Fixing Jeans

We recently bought set of cheap wire drawers from Ikea to make our closet less of a disaster. Before, it was pretty much just my sweaters and some towels falling off of a cheap wooden shelf left behind by the previous tenant.

The cat doesn't have much more success staying on than my sweaters did.

 Now it looks like this:

The entire contents of the shelf fit into two drawers... so I had room to take down the awful hanging organiser and give Brad's shirts (at the top of the picture there) properly space.

In the process of reorganising that stuff, I finally decided it was time. Time and past to throw out the holy pairs of jeans I'd been hanging on to. I loved them, yes, but they had holes in  places that holes are inappropriate. I'd been saving them in case I decided to patch them, but the only patching I'd done was with rainbow-coloured fabric. And while that was a fine.. uh... expression of individuality at the age of sixteen, it really won't do for twenty-four year-olds. I reluctantly put them in the garbage pile, along with some bras that the wires were poking out of that I'd also been telling myself maybe I could fix. It's hard throwing things away when there is just one small thing wrong! Even if that one thing makes them completely non-functional.

But then! This post appeared on one of my favourite DIY blogs! In a recent post about making cut-offs, the blogger linked to her past post about mending jeans. It's so simple!

So I tried it.

Here's the holes.

I didn't have any interfacing, but I thought, hey, all these reusable grocery bags look/feel kinda  like interfacing! So I improvised. I cut some patches out of a bag, stitched them into place with a loose basting stitch, then went to it. Fun! To finish, I pulled out the basting stitches, trimmed the 'interfacing' closer to the patch, and zig-zag stitched it into place.

The results!

Yay! I really went to town on the top pair, but did a bit less on the bottom pair. By then I was starting to run out of thread... I may have used up most of a spool.
It's a bit stiff, but you can't really see the patches when they're worn, since on the bottom pair it's right where the butt folds into leg, and the top pair is basically between the legs anyway.

Now I just have to do something about this:

They're both a bit long (which is why the hems are frayed) so hopefully can handle a re-hemming. I'll get to them. Some day.