Patching Denim

I very rarely buy new clothes, and instead recycle and repurpose my clothes until they are unwearable. 

The most common repair I have to do, is fixing the crotch/inner thigh of my pants. I have performed this operation on dozens of pants, and it is very easily fixed, if you have a little bit of patience.

Step 1: Materials and Tools

For this projects I used:

• Pair Busted Pants (the inner thigh ripped out on this pair.)
• Scrap material from an old pair of jeggings I cut up into a skirt.
• Scissors
• Sewing Machine (you can hand stitch, but just try and keep really tight tension)
• Dark Thread
• Pins

Step 2: Cut and Pin

I like to make square or rectangular patches that will cover the damaged area of the denim, and using a stretch fabric will help prevent the patch from ripping out.

Using a stretchy thin material will be easier to sew through, versus sewing two layers of denim.

If you are going to machine sew a patch on, go ahead and pull of whatever guards or feed trays off your machine that may be around your needle - you are going to want to have access to various grip points on the denim when feeding something like pants in the machine.

Step 3: Sew It!

To sew the patch on, I make a zig zag pattern pulling the material to the right as I go, and use really short tight stitches.

Start by stitching down, then holding the reversing button/lever (that differs on every sewing machine I have ever used), gently pull the pants to the right. 

Repeat this sequence up and down the patch until you get to the left border of your patch.

I then sunk my needle down in to the material and rotated it, sewing a final perimeter box around the patch.

That's it!

Make sure you don't have any pins in it and then wear 'em!