#Spending 8 hours mending pants while deeply sleep deprived made me feel like I was becoming the Gollum

[moongothic]

I did not take any before photos, because all I meant to do was remove this busted ass backpocket from an old pair of pants and leave it at that. This was not supposed to be A Thing that I'd document. It was supposed to be a quick, low-effort improvement

But then I noticed this

A rip. On the ass seam of my precious pants. Kinda, it's not quite a hole yet but as you can clearly see, the fabric has deteriorated really badly and is well on its way to becoming a massive hole. On the ass seam.

And so I spent 8 hours mending these god damn fucking pants

If you needed more context as to WHY I'm so deeply upsetti about fixing these pants, here, I'm not even bothering with a TL:DR

The damage was about like 5-7 cm long (did not measure and can't be bothered to go check anymore), quite sizeable and as you can see from the photo above, quite see-thru. Like it wasn't too bad YET, I don't think anybody would've been able to see my underwear through the ripped area but. I wanted to fix it before it got to that point, right

So yeah. Started working on mending the seam at like 4 am, after I super quickly watched like two YouTube videos about mending rips on pants just to get an idea of what to do and just went for it.

Important thing to note is that because I started working on this in the middle of the night, I could not use the sewing machine because it woud wake up the whole bloody neighborhood. So it was gonna be all by hand

So I grabbed some scrap black cotton fabric I had laying around to use as reinforcement for the mending. In one of the videos I watched, the person demonstrating their mending technique used some iron-on adhesive to attach their fabric patch instead of relying on pins. Because I wanted to make this as easy as possible and because I figured it could help stabilize and strenghten the broken fibers a little bit (maybe?), I used some fabric glue because it's all I happened to have on hand

So I very gently dabbed a tiny bit of glue onto the the damaged area (inside the pants) and slapped my fabric piece onto it, cutting it slightly smaller after the glue was dry enough

And yes I failed the apply the patch straight so the first like centimeter of the damaged area didn't even get the patch on it. But like. Whatever man fdjghskdjfg

I picked some sewing thread that matched the pants' colors the best and just. Got to mending/borderline embroidering. On the bottom picture, you can see the first litle bit of mending I did on the right side, mostly on one red stripe and just a smidge on the black to the right of it.

It looks like ass.

Also, although I tried to apply as little glue as possible to the area, I still appearently managed to apply too much, so there's like visible glue residue on the ripped area. The glue also made the fabric really stiff and thick, which I could notice because I could tell if I did any mending outside the glue area, like my needle could pass so much easier through the two layers of fabric if there was no glue.

This alone made the process of just mending this rip take eight fucking hours. Also using a single thread of sewing thread did not help, I did realize on the final four stripes I could hold two threads at once for better coverage, so better late than never, but jesus christ I'm a dumbass

(Also no I absolutely do not expect the sewing thread of hold up super well, it'll last however long it'll last and that's that)

But yes. I kept on mending. For eight hours. From 4 am to noon. I did take like two brief snack breaks but that was p much it. Eventually, I had this on my hands

Cleaned it up a little bit and it turned into this

Now this cotton I used to reinforce the rip probably wasn't the best pick because it did want to start fraying immidiately, so I ended up applying just a smidge of the fabric glue onto the black cotton too, just to help it last a smidge longer maybe and keep it from fraying

But yeah, with that, the mending was done. I did have a Moment of Fear when I realised that the black cotton was quite thick and I was suddenly So Afraid the patch would become visible once I'd put the pants on-- like the shape of the patch ghosting on the other side. Which, considdering the shape and the location of it would be absolutely mortifying

But, when I did a quick test try-on of the pants I realized that the rip was actually much lower than I first thought, closer to my crotch than butt. Also, while the mending looks horrendous close-up, ain't nobody going to notice it from a distance when it's so low in my crotch.

So it's all good! The mending worked out!

Again, it doesn't look good close-up, it's super wonky (since the glue spread the fibers and left them stuck in the position they were in and I was just trying to follow the stripes), but it's good enough

Anyway, at that point I figured. I've gone out of my way to fix this rip when all I meant to do was remove a back-pocket. I might as well go all the way and fix that pocket properly too

To me back-pockets on pants have no purpose aside from maybe protecting the actual fabric of the pants from wearing out so fast by taking the damage instead. So I didn't need a pocket replacement (hence I considdered it optional to begin with)

But when I ripped the pocket off you coud see where the pocket had originally been, and while the indentation could probably be fixed by ironing the pants a bit, there were these small holes from where yarn had gone through the fabric so like. Yeah let's just replace the pocket

(Also sorry about the cat hair, did not clean it for this photo because god knows it would've been covered in a whole new layer 2 minutes later, you know how it is)

Using the same black cotton (since it's what I have and it fits just fine here), I freehanded the pocket like a gremlin.

Could not be bothered to do a better job, but again, I don't need it to be a functional pocket.

The good news though was that by this point it was noon, so I could bring out my sewing machine to finish the job for me

(I could have hemmed the sides, but did not bother. It's going on the inside, this is good enough)

Pinned it down to where the original pocket had been (using the indentation as a guide) to sew it on

And boom, pants fixed

The pocket took me like less than two hours to add (but this doesn't include the time it took me to remove the original pocket in the first place), so, yeah, much faster than hand-mending the rip.

In hindsight, I probably should've replaced both pockets if only because the fabric on the other pocket is wearing down, but like

By the time the thought crossed my mind I had already lint rolled all the cat hair off the pants and ironed them, the sewing machine was already put away so I did not want to bother with it. It's fine

But ye, you really need to look close to notice the mending, my 13~ish year old pants from approx. middle school are okay now, they have been saved. And now I can wear them to tomorrow's convention. Wheeeeeee