Patching Clothes, Old School Style

I have had many an occasion to observe other people mending their clothes.  Most of the time, but not always, it makes me want to cry.  It's not my friends' faults; they don't know they're actually shortening the clothing life instead of extending it, which is the purpose of a mend.  So here I'm going to describe a good way to do one kind of clothing repair: the patch.

The patch is just what you think it is.  It's an extra piece of fabric slapped on to fix a hole in the main garment.  But where does it go?  What stitch should you use?  What fabric and thread should you use?  These are all important questions, and the answers depend on how formal the clothing is, how strong the base fabric is, and how much stress you will put the garment through.

Clothing Style: If you're a dirty hippie like I am, then you have lots of clothes for which an obvious patch would be an accent, not a detriment.  Matching colors and prints doesn't matter at all, nor does patch shape.  But there are also the times when you kind of want your repair to blend in.  You could choose a matching fabric to apply on the outside in a plain square or oval, and you might try to keep your stitches invisible.  Or, instead of invisible stitches, you might prefer machine stitches, for that factory-made look.  That's up to you.  You might not be able to wear this to a job interview anymore, but you would avoid dirty looks in department stores. 

Base Fabric Strength: Your patch fabric and thread should match your base fabric, period.  I learned in museum collections care that when sewing a label onto a textile, choose your thread so that in a battle of strength, it will lose to the textile.  That is, if the tag gets caught on something, you want the tag to rip off rather than the tag ripping a hole in the textile.  Same with your patches.  Patch and thread that are too heavy will wear out the base garment, but patch and thread that are too light will wear themselves out and need replacing.

Stress:  A wedding dress that will never be worn or laundered again doesn't need much from a patch.  It's not taking much strain.  But heavy-duty work pants will take a lot of abrasion, body movement, and laundering.  Eliminating raw edges in the patched area will keep the garment from fraying under all that stress.  You may also need heavier thread or closely-spaced stitches in this case.

Also ask yourself if patching is the best solution.  A seam is the thread that holds two separate pieces (or two different areas) of fabric together.  When the seam rips--that is, when the thread breaks but the fabric is unharmed--you only need to replace the seam.  You only need a patch when the fabric itself is damaged.  Also see darning.  Sometimes the base fabric is so worn out that there's nothing good to sew your patch to.  Rather than fight a losing battle, consign such worn out garments to the rag bag.

Some people make seams where they should make patches.  A hole develops in their base fabric, and they pinch the two sides together, seaming on the inside.  This does keep raw, frayed edges from view, but it alters the geometry of the fabric.  Think of a piece of fabric in a garment.  It lays flat, like a geometric plane.  But pinch some inner piece of the plane out of existence, and it's got depth and puckers.  It's 3D in the wrong way.  And now it is smaller in all the places that cross this bad mend, while the rest of the garment is the same as it was before.  This difference causes stress in the mended area, and stress means you are more likely to make a new tear.  My hiking parter J ripped his pants in the crotch, already a high-stress area.  He put a seam in them.  They ripped again, nearby.  Another seam.  Another rip, even sooner.  As the crotch of his pants got smaller and smaller, he ripped them more and more, until he finally gave up and hung some fabric from his waistband to cover his junk.  Then he had to buy new pants.  This is what happens when you make a seam where you should have made a patch.  So lets learn how to make patches, shall we?

 

 Here's my favorite skirt.  It's gathered to a yoke at the hips, which you see here.  I had a safety pin in the yoke and accidentally ripped it out. (Remember the lesson about museum tags?)  So now I have a hole in the fabric, and it's complicated by being so close to both the hip seam (to the right in this picture) and the side seam (just above).  Since it used to belong to my aunt back in the day AND it's my favorite, it's got a lot of wear in it.  It was also a relatively light fabric to begin with, so I need to make sure not to go overboard with the patch.  I pick a lightweight blue fabric, and cut it into a square, and choose all-purpose sewing thread.




I turn my skirt inside-out and baste the patch to the skirt, using red thread here.  This keeps the patch from moving while I work.  Pins would work too.  The basting comes out later.  Turn the edges of the patch under so you can't see them, and sew around the patch.  Use whatever stitch you like; I've used a running stitch.


 

Going back to the right side, I carefully turn under the edges of the L-shaped hole, again so I can't see them, and stitch.  I've used a whipstitch. (I mistakenly put the patch over the seams inside the garment and had to deal with them getting in the way and showing through here.  Because of them, it was hard to turn my raw edges under in some places, so I covered the raw edges with a very dense whipstitch.  You can see it at the bottom.)  My basting thread is still in, but I will remove it before I wear the skirt.

This kind of patching results in a fabric with no raw edges, inside or outside.  Nothing to fray and endanger all your hard work.  It was the method used historically for undergarments (when you only have a few, you really want to make them last) and for sails (and if you don't have them, you're not making it to land).  It won't work for everything, but it's a strong and servicable repair for single-layer items.

For information on different kinds of stitches, see here.

Edit, May 2012:  Here's another example, outside and inside, of this style of patch.