Mending Old Jeans - HowTo

Ever have that PERFECT pair of jeans that gets an embarasing rip in it? Or they have holes in them from regular use? Then you go to Walmart and buy those patches, but the jean pattern doesn't exactly match. Bummer! Well, I found a pretty good tutorial that'll fix -any- jean rip/hole, no matter the color of your jeans - using interfacing! Here's the tutorial that I used. I'll take you through the steps I used and some snags I ran into...

Following the directions in the Tutorial, I ironed on the interface on the inside of the jean. Then I turned it right-side out and started sewing back and forth, back and forth... over and over again. My first attempt's results were:

Looks like someone took a pen and scribbled on some paper, right? 

This is what it looks like on the outside of the pants:

With my first attempt, I tried my hardest to cover up as much white as possible. The picture shown above demonstrates the difference of pre-stitching vs. post-stitching. Hardly a difference. There's still a lot of white showing, even though I tried my hardest.

With the first attempt, I was trying to stitch with the grain of the pants. After it took forever-and-a-day to finish, I wanted to see what would happen if I did a more... sloppy stitch.

With this one (above), I didn't care about the grain and I stitched much fewer lines. I didn't take a picture of the finished product, but there wasn't much of a difference between my first attempt and my second attempt. They were both patched up and still had some faded white showing through the stitching. But all-in-all, they looked pretty good!

BE CAREFUL! You could end up sewing a few layers together. I was very careful while I was sewing, trying to keep it as flat as I could feel. Somehow there were still a few stitches that attached themselves to another layer of the pants. THIS CAN HAPPEN TO YOU!!!

Luckily I didn't sew too much into the fabric, and it's a really easy fix. You just snip the extra threads and re-do the area that was snipped. Easy peasy. 

The tutorial mentions that you can sew a border around the excess white interfacing to keep it from coming loose. I have NO idea how you'd be able to sew a 360 degrees on a pant-leg, though, without hand stitching it. I've seen other tutorials where they take pinking scissors and cut around the sewn part. I would personally just keep ironing it back down every time it comes up, or just trim it then iron it. I'm a low-maintenance kind-of-gal. 

Overall, the project was easy. Another 2/5. Might be 3/5 depending on your sewing skills (for my sister, this'd be a 3/5 project) but if you're used to handling a sewing machine, it's pretty easy. The thread I used was this, Dual Dity Plus Denim Thread. Great stuff.

Also I have to apologize; the reason it took a few days to create this post was because we had family over periodically throughout the weekend starting Friday, so I just wasn't able to update. Family first, ya know. :)