Visible Mending - How to Mend Your Clothes While Self-Isolating Series: 5 Easy Stitch Fixes

Visible mending is a trend and technique that can be applied to most anything and is only limited by your imagination. You can use it in place of darning small holes on t-shirts, like I did, or even to repair jeans! I like to use embroidery thread for this as it stands out well against your garment.

How to Visibly Mend

I had this little hole and decided I wanted to stitch a star over it, so that’s what I did! If your hole is larger, you may want to include a patch to help strengthen your fabric. Just cut a patch slightly larger than your hole and stick on the inside of your garment, then when you stitch, make sure you are catching the patch. This will help stabilize.

The patch method is how you would go about fixing jeans, particularly ripped jeans. I didn’t have any jeans that needed to be mended at the time of writing this post, but I have these jeans I’ve been visibly hemming rather than mending that follow a similar principle. The jeans were too long and getting worn out at the bottom, so instead of folding the hem internally and stitching, I decided it would be cool to fold it up on the outside and create fun embroidery to hold it in place.
If you’re fixing jeans with a hole in the knee, you could use a patch cut from another pair of jeans or another fabric of similar weight. Up to you if you want the patch to be internal or external, though internal is more common. Again, it should be a bit bigger than your hole! Use pins to hold it in place as you stitch, either rows, a spiral can look super cool, or a bunch of random nonsense, as I’ve been doing with the hem! Your stitches will reinforce and stabilize the patch, and add a unique detail to your jeans!

This blog is an excerpt from a post that was originally written for and featured on Remake. Please support their work and get more resources from them here.