A stitch in time

When Brian's jeans wear out, it's usually the knees that go first. This is a fairly easy area to repair: I simply sew on one of my pocket patches, salvaged from an older pair of jeans. This simple fix enables him to get another year or two of use out of them before they wear out completely.

With my own pants, however, it's a different story. The area most likely to get holes is the inside of the thighs, a much harder spot to repair. The best method I've come up with is to sew a patch over the inside, but it usually doesn't take too long before I wear through the patch as well. (Just this week, a patch I put in my black jeans last spring blew out completely, forcing me to consign the entire pair to the rag bin.)

Clearly, it would be much better if I could find some way to prevent, rather than repair, holes in this area. So when I noticed that my grey corduroys had developed two bald patches on the inner thighs where all the ribs had worn off, I wondered, could I reinforce the fabric there before holes developed? Would the same honeycomb darning technique I'd used on my old wool socks work over this much larger area?

I didn't know the answer, but I figured I didn't have much to lose by trying. If I did nothing, the pants surely wouldn't last the winter, so even if my attempt was a complete failure, I wouldn't be taking much off their lifetime. I went through my stash of embroidery floss, selected a nice bright turquoise that I thought would contrast well with the grey, and proceeded to stitch. 

Not surprisingly, repairing this large worn area was a much bigger job than darning the socks had been. The painted rock I use as a darning egg was much smaller than the area I needed to patch, so I slipped a hardcover book inside the leg of the pants and tucked the fabric under that. I threaded my needle with the longest length of floss I could manage, but it still was only enough to complete three rows of stitches, covering only a fraction of the bald patch. I had to thread it several more times before I was done, using up nearly an entire skein of floss.

I realized at this point that I'd made a tactical error in choosing the turquoise floss. I knew the assortment I'd bought at Michael's contained two skeins of every color, but apparently this was an extra I'd picked up somewhere else, and I didn't have an exact match for it. To do the other side, I had to choose another skein of a slightly different blue. I'll just have to hope that no one ever sees both repaired sides at once and notices the mismatch.

All told, the whole process took a couple of hours, spread out over two or three days. To most people, that may seem like an awfully big investment of time to save a pair of pants that cost me less than $10 at a thrift shop. But considering how hard it is for me to find new pants that fit, if this prolongs the cords' lifespan by at least a year, it will save me many frustrating hours of shopping to replace them. And if it doesn't, I'll know not to bother with it next time.