Monday, February 17, 2014

Fringy Flower Jeans

While I do not get around to much sewing these days, I did manage to eek out a little patch job for Miss Anna.  Anna had a very sad looking pair of jeans that kept popping up right before she needed to walk out the door for school.  These were jeans with huge holes in the knees and an unflattering leg shape that just caused bunching at the hem (the jeans have the unflattering leg shape, not my daughter).  If the jeans were getting too short, we would have been in a similar situation with a similar solution.  I’m sure you have a pair or two floating around your house.

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I attempted to patch a pair of Erik’s jeans last year and learned a valuable lesson or two.  My biggest problem with Erik’s jeans was that I cut the patches too small and sewed them on very closely to the edges of the holes.  Guess what happens when you do that . . . they rip right out.  Why?  Because the part of the jean the patch is being sewn to is already weak and falling apart – it cannot support the stress knees put on jeans.

With another pair of holey jeans (Anna’s this time), I tried making little iron-on patches with negligible success.  What did I learn?  The patches were (again)too small.  And my super-duper-bonding-iron-on glue was not strong enough for wash and wear.

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This time I took all of that good mistake-experience and turned out a sturdy (and adorable) product.  First I cut out a nice big chunk of heavy denim from an old pair of my jeans to use as the support backing for the flower patches (the red and white fabric was glued to one of the denim rectangles).  Then ripped the exterior seam almost all the way up to the pockets so I could work with a flat surface.  I stitched the denim patches to the inside of the jeans, sewing deeply into the good jean fabric and staying away from the frayed, damaged fabric near the original holes.  Then I dug through my ribbons and ruffles scrap box and prettied up those patches.  I made sure the pretty parts were being stitched on all the way through the super-size denim patches inside the jeans.  The result was the patches have two or three concentric stitching rings attaching them to the good, sturdy fabric of the original jeans.

Lastly, to address the problem at the hem I cut strips about 3/8” apart from the hem to about 4”.  I saw this idea in a book called Naturally Fun Parties for Kids by Anni Daulter, and could not wait to try it out on a dying little pair of jeans that deserved a second chance at life.  They are all fray-ey and fuzzy and soft now that they’ve been through the wash a few times.

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These are Anna’s current favorite jeans.  They are so unique, though, that she can’t get away with wearing them as often as she would like.  (Seriously, you wear jeans like that every single day, people would notice you haven’t washed your clothes all week.)  I LOVE how they turned out.  Another pair of holey jeans turned up last week.  This one has butterflies and hearts stitched up the sides.  I think I can work with that.

1 comment:

Sierra said...

Very clever, and somewhat retro. I like how happy Anna looks with it. That's the most rewarding part of creating.

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