mending jeans 12-14-25

Crawling around on their knees, pushing toy cars and muttering car sounds, our boys wore holes in the knees of their pants with their constant motion.I became adept at sewing knee patches and even patches on top of patches. The boys did not mind the patches, but I sought and found sturdier pants with reinforced knees. One son’s tales of his hard childhood includes his miserable declaration, “My mom bought me Tough Nut jeans.” One of the boys challenged my sewing skills the day he got so mad that he grabbed the front of the button-up shirt he was wearing and ripped it open. Small corners of fabric appeared as buttons popped off and flew everywhere. It was quite a show. I don’t recall the reason for his angst or the subsequent discipline. I do remember studying that row of square rips down the front of the shirt puzzling out how to fix it. No question I would fix it. After all, I had repaired the shredded seams on my loafers with a big needle, thick thread and a pair of pliers. I liked those shoes so much I repaired them often before the soles required I trash them.Looking at the shirt’s rips I remembered Mom’s favorite repair solution: iron on patches. I added a few reinforcing stitches, sewed on the buttons and pronounced it good as new.That was then. Now, I recommend a local seamstress when folks want repairs or alterations. Quite often I make tattered and torn clothing disappear.I wanted to do that when torn jeans with big and little holes down the front of jeans became the fashion. I didn’t see cute, I saw a denim sewing crisis everywhere. People with “fashionable rips” just look like people wearing jeans badly in need of repair.Then I watched a video of a woman excitedly showing off her new, holey jeans. “They only cost $100!” She proudly declared. With that, I stuck my needle in my pin cushion and walked away from the idea of holey “fashionable” jeans, until the day Sam, 11, asked, “Grandma, can you fix these jeans? I used to like them with the holes, but now I don’t.””Sure, I can!” I quickly pulled out iron-on patches and double stitched them over the holes. He grinned and declared,”that’s just what I wanted.”I never expected to hear anything like that from Elijah, 19. He frequently shops for old clothes to wear and then resell. His bargains look tattered and torn, even when he says, “This will sell for $75.”So I was surprised when he showed up at my house for Thanksgiving carrying a torn t-shirt and a pair of light blue jeans with a hole in the right knee asking if I could fix it.I fixed one of the shirt’s tears as he watched. Then I coached him through fixing the other tear. When we finished he exclaimed, “That’s it? I spent $25 to have someone do that for me.” For the knee repair, we cut off a wide cuff of his grandfather’s old, stained jeans. Then I worked the fabric down to the knee and pinned the repair fabric over the hole. “You have to sew slowly and ease the fabric around,” I said. “Then turn it inside out, tuck the edges of the hole under and top stitch it.”I held up the light blue jeans with the dark patch at the knee. Eli echoed Sam, “That’s exactly what I wanted.”“Any time you want to learn to do it yourself and charge $25 a pop, I will give you a sewing machine,” I promised.I hope he does claim his machine. We need someone to carry on the family tradition of mending clothes.