How to patch jeans with a small hole or rip

My husband and I just finished moving across the state and while unpacking his clothes in the new house, my husband (re)discovered one of his favorite pairs of jeans. He hadn’t worn them in probably over a year… because of a small rip in the thigh and wear in the crotch area. He’s really not one for the ripped jeans look 😉

So I decided to fix them for him! Today I’m just going to show you how I fixed the rip in the leg of the jeans. We’ll save reinforcing the crotch for another blog post.

If you have a pair of jeans with a hole needing mending, read on! I hope I can help you save your favorite pair of jeans.

Here’s how to patch your jeans:

What you need

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• jeans with a hole to mend
• extra denim or other cotton fabric to patch the hole
• thread matching your jeans
• hand sewing needle
• scissors
• double sided tape (you could also twist regular tape into little loops and use it like double sided tape)

Steps

1. Gather supplies and prepare a patch large enough to cover the hole
2. Place double sided tape on the patch
3. Press the patch over the hole on the inside of the jeans
4. Sew over the hole and gently pull the edges of the rip together
5. Trim away the edges of the patch on the inside
6. Done!

Video

I have a video here showing you how I patched these jeans. I sped it up to 2x speed and cut out some of the actual sewing because I sew kind of slow and didn’t think you guys would want to watch a ten minute video 😉 but you should be able to see what I did. Also there’s no sound, so don’t worry about turning your volume up.

 

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A post shared by Carmen (@adoptyourclothes) on Oct 24, 2019 at 10:42am PDT

If you prefer to learn by reading and pictures, I have written instructions below.

Instructions

So the first step is to gather all your supplies. For the double sided tape, I used Wonder Tape, but really any double sided tape would work. I also prepared a denim patch large enough to cover the hole.

Next, I placed a few pieces of tape on the denim patch I had prepared. You can also use a piece of cotton shirting or quilt fabric if you don’t have any denim available. I also turned the leg of the jeans with the hole inside out.

Then I placed the patch over the hole, on the inside of the jeans, and pressed with my hand until the tape felt secure.

Next, turn the pants right side out again. Then grab your needle and thread it with a double thickness of thread, double knot and trim the end of the thread. Using thread that matches the color of the jeans will help the repair to be less noticeable. Starting at one end of the hole, push the needle up on one side of the rip and back down the other side. Gently pull the thread to pull the edges of the rip together. Continue across the hole like this until you read the end of the rip.

Here’s what it looked like on the inside:

Tie off and trim your thread tails on the inside of the jeans. Now you can be done sewing here if you want, but I wanted some extra security. So I re-threaded my needle and sewed over the hole again in the same way but in the other direction. Here’s what it looked like when I was done:

The final step is just to pull the edges of the patch up by tugging the tape free, then trim around your stitching.

And that’s it! I think they turned out pretty good, not quite as invisible as I would have liked, but I think they’ve been saved.

I hope this helped you save your favorite pair of jeans 🙂

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