Patching Jeans

I bought my favorite pair of jeans last winter at Kohl's for $20.  They are Mudd brand and they are awesome.  Dark, soft denim, skinny leg, perfect for wearing when I ride my horse.   I've worn them almost every time I've ridden over the past year - hundreds of times.  But a couple weeks ago I noticed a problem - I had worn big holes along the inseam where they come in contact with the saddle.

Having never patched jeans before I wasn't too confident I would be able to do it.  So I wore them with the holes for another few rides - but the holes grew and it was time to stop wearing them in public.

Thankfully I had some strips of denim that my husband had cut off of the bottom of his jeans a while back (we are pretty short people) in my scrap stash.  Not sure what I was doing, I plunged in.

 

I turned the jeans inside-out and pinned a long strip of denim on each leg's inseam.  The hole doesn't look too big in the picture but the jeans were worn very thin surrounding the hole and I wanted the denim strip to cover all the thin spots.  I didn't worry about the denim strip overlapping any seams of the pants when I pinned it on.  I decided that I wanted even more coverage so I added more strips for a total of two on each inseam. 

Then I sewed around the perimeter of each strip using a zig-zag stitch.

The hardest part was figuring out how to access all the spots I needed to sew - it took a lot of reorienting my jeans on the machine and I stuck myself with quite a few pins, but all in all it wasn't too hard.  I just sort of winged it. Here's what it looked like when I was done sewing (and cutting off the excess denim over the seams).

Inside-out

The only difference on the outside is the stitches (you can see the darker blue denim through where the holes used to be)! Oh, and now you can't see through my pants =)

Right-side out

I read that you need a special needle to sew denim and was a little worried that I would break the needle that came in my machine but I didn't have any problems.  I was glad to not have to spend extra money on a new needle!  Originally I thought I might need to put another patch of t-shirt fabric over the denim so that I didn't get any rubs on my legs when riding, but I tested them out and they were really comfortable!  Success!  I wonder how many more hundreds of rides I can get out of these jeans...