Saturday, April 6, 2013

Healing Humble Cloth


This evening I decided to finally patch my favorite, comfortable jeans.


I was inspired by India Flint's book, Second Skin: Choosing and Caring for Textiles and Clothing. It's a beautiful book. The photography is amazing. You can almost feel the textures! I will go into more detail about this book in another post. Just know that I was thinking about those lovely stitched and patched pieces of cloth when I sat down to stitch my own humble pair of jeans.


Such a large tear called for two layers of patching. I found some indigo dyed ikat cotton and stitched a patch to the inside first.


I then created a patch to fit directly over the tear. I wanted it to match the colors of the jeans as closely as possible.


After ladder stitching around the edges of the patch. I did running stitch all the way around and then decided to do rows of running stitch across the patch.

The layers were soft and easy to stitch through, even though positioning my hands to stitch was sometimes awkward.


The finished patch. I like the quilted feel of it. It seems pretty sturdy.

4 comments:

  1. Wonderful! There are jeans in my closet waiting for mending as well...although given the number of holes, they'd probably be best to use as the patches.

    Isn't India's book amazing? I have both...and have yet to actually read them. Hope she doesn't read that. Sorry India! The photographs and work shown are such that I get lost in the wonder of it all.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Jennifer...good to hear fr you. I love this book...know what you mean about reading versus looking and absorbing. I have been reading it off and on and plan to plow through it. The design and photos are gorgeous. I also loved the Gallery section that includes all the other artists. Makes you want to pick up needle and thread and just start stitching everything!

      Delete
  2. I'm so impressed by your mending job - it's a little work of art!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Lisa. It really felt like I was working on a small piece of art. I have been thinking a lot about the concept of "healing cloth"...I think it's "cool" that healing can be a verb and an adjective in this case. I am batting about an idea about making healing cloths. We could all do with a bit of healing.

      Delete