The kid, now an adult with a professional job and his own apartment 90 minutes away, asked me to do some mending for him. Before he moved out, his Oshkosh Gramma gave him some lessons on basic mending along with a sewing kit. He can do some of his own mending, but this job seemed a bit too advanced for his current skill set.
It was a hole in the elbow of his favorite sweatshirt / sweater.
Mending is not my favorite thing to do, so I've been procrastinating. Although, I don't consider mending to be creative work, it does take a fair bit of creative thought and planning to repair something like this. I had to watch a video to learn how myself, shown here for documentation's sake and to give the sewist credit for teaching me something new:
How to Repair and Patch Your Sweater's Elbows - The Daily Sew
The first step was to add a flannel patch under the hole. This is sewn by hand at the edges of the patch and again at the edges of the hole. Doesn't matter what color the patch is because it won't be seen on the outside.
The next step is to do a bit of darning with yarn. I think this is wool. Although while I was doing it, it felt a lot like weaving. Not pretty, but it will give him a nice little cushion under his elbow in future. Again, color doesn't matter. This doesn't have to match, or even coordinate. It won't be visible on the outside.
The next step is to make a patch of like material to cover the inner mending. The sweatshrt is some kind of knit material, so I opted for knit material from a pair of pants that are too short for me. It matches quite well and was easy to hand sew with a whip stitch. Maybe I should have used an oval shape? We'll see how this endures ...
Here is the final patch. Looks tidy and neat. I hope he doesn't blow out the other elbow, because I don't really want to do it again.
1 comment:
Yeah, I'm not big on mending either, although I do it because otherwise it seems such a waste to bin an otherwise perfectly good item. When I read " it will give him a nice little cushion under his elbow", I thought well gee, you need to give the other elbow a nice little matching cushion too, so had to laugh at your final hoping you don't HAVE to mend the other elbow. Goodness, you've raised that boy well, to want to rescue a fave rather than just chuck it.
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