jeans surgery

being someone who knows how to sew and related to someone that works at a bike shop i get a lot of busted jeans sent to me for repair.  most of it is "biker butt" where the ass is totally ripping out.

tim sent a couple of pairs of jeans home with ethan the other day and i thought i'd take the chance to show how i fix them.  this pair has already had a "preemptive strike."  if someone gives me a new-ish pair that has one or two holes to fix i'll go ahead and stitch in an extra layer of denim over the whole ass to reinforce them.

instead of showing how to fix a hole on the already gnarly ass, i'll fix the one on the knee first.  i always thought knees were the nail in the coffin for jeans until i realized that the side seam is held together by just one row of stitching and can be opened (gaining access to the holy knee) and closed again relatively simply.

the fist thing is to cut off all the stray threads that line the hole--they just get in the way and make the whole thing look messy.  then take a scrap of denim and pin it to the wrong side of the hole.  i've got a bin full of scraps from making jeans, making cut-offs, and hemming jeans, so i can usually match the colors pretty well.

when pinning, try to lay the piece of fabric flat and as close to the original shape of the hole as possible, that way you're not fixing the hole but at the same time expanding it to twice the size of the original.

then stitch around the hole as close as possible.  flip the denim inside out and cut off the excess fabric as close as possible to the stitching.

then you want to just go back and forth a shit ton to basically marry the two fabrics.  i like to work in a grid pattern.  usually i like to use a variegated blue denim thread to match the colors a little better, but there was already black thread in my machine and this pair is on its last leg anyway.

the crotch area can be a little more difficult because of all the different planes and angles that are coming together, but you are basically fixing it exactly the same way as the knee.

this week ethan and i went to the museum of natural history and the hayden planetarium.  we checked out the new show in the planetarium, journey to the stars, that was narrated by whoopi goldberg and it was awesome!  i love going to planetarium shows, i just wish they were longer.

and running concurrently there's an exhibit in the museum called beyond planet earth about the future of space exploration.  you get to see some old and new space suits, capsules, and rovers and learn about the future.  blue sky on mars!  totally awesome!