Week 23. Make do and mend #2. Mending small rips and tears.

I often build up a small pile of clothes which need mending. I have in the past shared my rescuing of a favourite pair of socks through darning in my 4th blog post: Darning socks. A few weeks ago too I shared my first make do and mend post all about fixing up broken zips: Make do and mend #1

This week, I wanted to share the value of stitching up small rips and tears in clothes to make them last longer. It is great way to get the most wear possible out of clothes before they are reused in some way. Such as making them into cleaning cloths or rags. It is also wonderful to save the money that might have been spent on getting a new item of clothing too.

Something that has been in my mending pile all winter long are these swimming shorts which have a tear just above the pocket. As the sun has now begun shining, it is high time the moved to the top of the mending pile.

Luckily, the tear is not too big and so I was easily able to sew it up. A good lesson here is that a stitch in time really does save nine! The small the tear, the easier it is to mend and more likely that the mending can be done so the tear is invisible. If the tear is too big, you may need to mend it with a patch. I will cover how to do this in a future blog post.

Usually I begin by turning the garment inside out so I can catch any small threads.

I try to match the color of the garment with the color of thread as best as possible. Here, the color of the shorts is such a light cream color, I used a white thread. All I did as can be seen in the picture above is went back and forth with the cotton thread. In this case the fabric is quite thin. If the fabric was thicker, I might do larger stitches but criss cross them.

Here are the mended shorts in all their glory! The tear can still be seen but it will mean that they might have another few more years of wear out of them : )

Happy mending!