DIY: How to Save Your Favorite Jeans

We all have a favorite pair of jeans. The ones that look great and fit just right.

Unfortunately, well-loved jeans don’t age gracefully. The culprit: holes in the knees, pockets, or back. If your favorite jeans start to look “holier than thou,” don’t despair.

With a needle, some thread, and a little love, you can turn dying jeans into designer jeans. (DIY difficulty level: Easy)

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I suspect that if you’re reading this site, you already have easy access to a needle and thread. But if thimbles and thread-rippers are Greek to you, then you’ll be happy to know that learning to sew by hand is very easy.

Step 1: Take your holy jeans, a sewing needle, and some thread. When choosing the color of thread, consult your inner fashion designer. (We all have one somewhere.)

• If you want the thread to show when you’re finished sewing, then choose a color of thread that would look great with the rest of the stitches on the jeans.
• If you don’t want the thread to show, then choose a color similar to the fabric of the jeans.

Step 2: You’ll also need a scrap of denim or two. My favorite jeans were hand-me-down Italian Energie jeans that I’d never bothered to hem, so I hemmed them before this project and used the extra fabric as my scrap fabric. If you don’t have some denim lying around, you can get some at your local crafts store. Or you could sacrifice a less-than-favorite pair of jeans. If your inner fashion designer is really an artistic wizard, you might also try patching your jeans with non-denim materials.

Step 3: Patching the jeans.

1. Place the scrap of material that you’ll use for the patch on the inside of the jeans. Make sure that the scrap more than covers the hole. Denim frays, so you’ll want to leave room for the material to fray by making your scrap about an inch larger (on all sides) than the hole you’re patching.
2. Thread the needle with your choice of thread and tie off the ends. Then push the needle and thread through the scrap and into your jeans. Be sure to start sewing from the inside! The tied-off ends of the thread should be on the inside of your jeans so they’re not visible.
3. Before you begin sewing, you have a decision to make: to make the thread visible or not. If you don’t want the thread to be visible, then every time you insert the needle into the outside of the jeans, insert it as close as possible to where the thread is coming out of the jeans.
4. As you sew, keep the needle and thread about 1/2 inch from the edge of both the scrap and jeans fabric. This will allow some room for fraying as the material ages.

Step 4: Finishing up

Sew all the way around the hole. When you’re done, you’ll have your favorite old jeans feeling like new. Plus, you can wear them proudly, knowing that your creative smarts went into making them look sharp.

The final product! (Note: Like my flower pillow? Yes, all Korean beds that I could find here really are this feminine.)

Related articles:

What Can You Do With Jeans?

Top 5 Must Have DIY Sewing Tomes

Photo credit: djloche (above); Me (left).

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