Mending

My husband is hard on clothes. Really hard. Because I want to learn to sew, he has been utilizing the opportunity to get his clothes fixed.

He tore the knee out of one of his pairs of cargo pants and the fabric was threadbare in one of the thighs. He asked me to make his pants into shorts and then to reverse applique (he did not use the term "reverse applique") his favorite fabric into the worn part of the thigh so he could use these as his grubby, fix his bike, wash the car, etc. shorts.

This project sounded easy enough, but wound up being a total pain in the butt. The position of the patch made it difficult to maneuver the sewing machine into the right place. And then when I tried to hem the shorts, the thickness of the fabric bent my needle. Of course, I didn't know anything about bent needles. All I knew was the machine randomly decided to stop working. Lots of googling helped me figure out what the problem was and then reading my complete owner's manual helped me fix it.

The fix on the second pair of shorts was much easier. The seam below the zipper split, and needed to be mended. My stitches aren't straight, but otherwise sewing these seams wasn't a big deal at all.

On the same pair of shorts, a hole was forming in the rear. Rather than deal with all the applique nonsense, as I had before, I simply cut a patch out of one legs from the pants I had made into shorts and used fusible tape on the inside to make a patch. I'll sew it in if the patch isn't able to hold up to washing and drying, but I'm trying to avoid that so I'll let him test it out a bit first.

Now, Chuk has two more pairs of usable shorts and it cost $0, and I know how to thread my machine without watching the instructional DVD or looking at the manual. Win.