Jason and I both have a really hard time getting rid of clothing, especially if they fit well, we like the way they look, etc. We tend to wear them beyond repair but just not repairing them. Instead of mending or patching up a hole when it first appears, we will just wear it out until it’s so ridiculous that we have to toss it or use it as a rag. Somehow we have it in our heads that this is being “thrifty”. Well that’s a load of crap. Mending the holes when they first appear would extend the life of the clothing buy a long time, plus we would look less sloppy. There is nothing thrifty about our laziness.

Well with a hole in my favorite sweater’s underarm, and a hole and a tear in Jason’s two favorite pair of jeans I’ve decided to start mending my ways (excuse the pun but I couldn’t help myself) and start stitching up those jeans.

With just a little googling around I found a really great article all about mending clothing called How to Mend Clothes over on HowStuffWorks and this little write up about what to keep in your mending kit over on Green Spun.

I started with the torn pants as it seemed like it was going to be the most annoying to fix. Jason said he didn’t mind if there was stitching, he just wanted to be able to wear them without them flapping around/tearing more. I read in the How to Mend Clothes article that for tears, mending tape works best. Well, I thought I had some of that around, but I didn’t so I used a strip of fusible interfacing instead. Oh a good tip my friend Trixy gave me about this, it’s smooth side up, bumpy side down. The bumps are the glue! Genius!

Pretty good for a start. It’s securely back together. I then clipped the threads and used the zigzag stitch to keep the edges from fraying. Plus that will keep the interfacing extra secure, keeping the tear extra secure. A win win in my mind. Oh and why zig zag? Because I read and know that straight stitching will come out way too easy and do pretty much nothing as far as fray goes. And I have a soft spot for the zig zag setting on my baby, babylock that is.

I picked a thread that was slightly darker than the fabric. I think lighter would show up like crazy, I could be wrong about that though.

Not bad, not bad at all.

The other two were pretty easy as they were just busted out seams. On the sweater, I checked to make sure that it was really indeed just the seam and not any of the knit stitches. No matter how much I fixed the seam, my sweater would still come apart if it was unraveled. I would need to do some darning. Thank goodness, it was just the seam, sweet! A quick fix. I made sure to stitch over and well past the frayed broken yarn on either side of the hole to keep that from fraying ore and then stitched up the hole just like I would sew a sweater together.

Presto Change-o! Good as new!

Then the pants. A similar thing, but I used a machine and just made sure to stitch back and forth several times over the broken ends.

It’s so easy to mend clothing and sooo worth it. Like I said before, it will extend the life of your favorite pants and sweaters by years! Seriously!

Oh and on another note. I don’t normally review products, but I was so impressed with this that I just have to share it with you. I was over at Joann’s the other day armed with my 40% off coupon looking for a sweat score and I found this:

It’s a fiskers scissor sharpener. Say what? Does this thing actually work? Yeah right. So I asked just that, “Does this thing actually work, seriously, does it?” And the girl there was like, “You know, I thought the same thing, but buying it at the cost of one sharpening of one pair of scissors I thought I would give it a shot. It works, it works really well. Just don’t use it too much or it will wear out really fast.” So I gave it a shot. Turns out it was already 40% off so at $7.11 I brought home my new sharpener. I ran one pair of very dull scissors through it just 4 cutting motions. It worked! My super dull, was thinking about just tossing because they couldn’t even go through one sheet of paper without snagging and tearing scissors, cut right though a thick piece of fabric like it was melty butter! I sharpened up all my scissors and they all work great now. I’m really happy to add it to my studio tool kit.

In other news I’ve made the choice to move the Craft Leftovers shop back over to Etsy, but under a new username: CraftLeftovers, makes sense right? I like Etsy, what can I say. I just love the community of it. I’ve transferred over some items already, but I’m going to bust my butt over the next couple of days to get some brand new kits added to the mix. The grand re-opening will be on Monday, September 15th, 2008. There will be a big sale and some special offers.

I also sent out the first Craft Leftovers Email Newsletter today. It’s like a digest of what’s new in the archive, what happened in the last month, and what is coming up. Plus there are give aways each month that are newsletter exclusives.

I’m going to spend tomorrow morning with my new sand paper on that dresser, so hopefully I’ll have some good news to report :)

Happy Crafting Folks!
Kristin Roach