Mending Lucas’ jeans (pt 3)

I’ve not blogged about these jeans previously, but this summer was the third time I took Lucas’ jeans in for a mend. I’ve taken some photos of the many mends on these jeans here to document what’s up with them.

Let’s start with my favourite and go in completely non-chronological order, shall we?

Lucas likes the truly worn out knees he’s earned, but the left knee was getting out of hand by round 3 of fixes, so he finally asked for some mitigation on that. I wanted to leave the damage as intact as damage as possible, and to allow it to continue to evolve without sacrificing structural integrity, decided to back it with a relatively firm and sashiko-reinforced patch that will become more visible with time. This is probably the single most careful section on these jeans, the back patch, which i worked on at the begining of this summer at my grandparents’. (much to their chagrin, they suggest i throw the jeans in a fire).

The other knee hole was smaller, and I decided to also leave it as a hole but to attempt to prevent further hole development. I added a silk patch below the hole, and wblanket-stitched the hole itself. I freehanded some reinforcing stitches across the patch itself, and just for fun did a contrast circle around the other whole developing. This turned out to be a mistake as the fabric in this area lacked any sort of structural integrity and the dense stitches around the little knee hole really just made that damage worse. Luckily the silk backing should remain strong for awhile!

Last fix-em-up I mended the crotch with machine darning. I weirdly really like how that wound up. I don’t have a darning foot so instead I typically leave the feed dogs as normal and just use the stitch reverse option to do big zig zags over the area i’m working on. I’d really like to see if I would work any more cleanly with a darning foot.

The rear is a whole hodgepodge as that’s what’s been treated to the most mends. Many machine darns - my favourite being right above the right hand pocket - and many messy hand darns. The right pocket has had a little bit of fabric basted in to make it a functional pocket again, but without removing the pocket for stitching.

The highlight on the back is probably the triangular pattern section down the left leg, and really I worry that I should have done the right leg this time around to prevent any tears. But it was time to get these back to their owner for awhile!!