Patch, darn and reinforce clothing

Clothing in a household doing more physical work wears out faster and cannot be replaced as easily. That combination makes this page worth more than it sounds, and it makes the timing more important than the technique: a thin patch of fabric caught early takes ten minutes and a hole takes an hour.

The other thing worth saying up front is that this is entirely learnable in an evening. There is no equipment, no expense and no talent involved.

Catch it before it is a hole

Look at the clothes coming out of the wash rather than waiting for a failure.

The signs a fabric is about to go:

• Thinning. Hold it to the light. Where you can see through the weave, it has months rather than years.
• A shine on the seat, the knees or the elbows, which is fibres worn flat.
• Fraying at a hem or a cuff.
• A seam beginning to pucker or pull away from the fabric on one side.
• Small pulls or snags in a knit.

A patch on thin fabric works properly. A patch across a hole never quite does, because you are attaching it to weakened cloth that will fail again at the edge of your repair. Ten minutes early beats an hour late, and the early repair is stronger.

Patching

Cut the patch with the grain matching the garment. Woven fabric stretches on the bias and hardly at all along the threads, so a patch on the wrong grain fights the cloth every time it moves and pulls the stitches out. Line the threads up.

Cut it generously, at least 2 cm bigger than the damage all round, and round the corners. Square corners peel; round ones do not.

Choose the fabric sensibly. Similar weight and similar fibre. A stiff canvas patch on a soft cotton shirt tears the shirt at the edge of the patch. Salvage from the same garment where you can: the inside of a pocket, the tail of a shirt, a turn-up.

Underpatching, which is the usual answer:

1. Trim any frayed threads and, if there is a hole, tidy it into a clean shape.
2. Pin the patch behind the damage, right side facing out through the hole.
3. Tack it in place first. This is the step everybody skips and it is why patches end up crooked.
4. Stitch around the edge of the damage with small running or backstitches, working outwards in a spiral or in rows, so the worn area is held to the patch across its whole face rather than only at the perimeter.
5. Finish the raw edge of the hole with a few whip stitches so it cannot fray further.

Overpatching, for knees and workwear: turn the patch edges under a few millimetres, pin, then backstitch all the way round. It shows, it lasts a long time, and on work clothes it looks like what it is.

Iron-on patches are a backing, not a repair. The adhesive fails with washing and flexing, and it fails first at the corners where the stress is. Use one to hold a patch in position, then sew it.

Darning

Darning rebuilds the fabric itself, thread by thread. It is for knits and for small holes where there is no sound fabric to patch onto.

The principle: you are weaving. First lay threads in one direction across the hole, anchored in sound fabric well beyond the edge. Then weave threads at right angles through them, over and under alternately.

1. Support the fabric over something curved. A darning mushroom is the traditional tool; a light bulb, a tennis ball, an orange or a mug all work.
2. Do not knot the thread. Start with a few small running stitches in the sound fabric to anchor it.
3. Work well outside the hole. Start about a centimetre out in good cloth, because the fabric right at the edge is already weak and stitching into it just moves the failure outwards.
4. Lay the warp: rows across the hole, close together, each one running from sound fabric to sound fabric. Leave a small loop at each turn so the darn can flex and does not pucker.
5. Weave the weft: at right angles, over one and under one, alternating each row. This is slow and it is the part that makes it a fabric rather than a lump.
6. Finish by running the thread into the sound fabric and burying the tail.

Do not pull tight. A darn should sit flat and flex with the cloth. Pulled tight, it forms a hard ridge that abrades whatever is next to it, which on a sock means your foot.

Match the thread weight to the fabric. Darning wool for knitwear, ordinary thread for woven cloth.

Socks specifically

Socks are the single highest-volume repair in a working household and they always go in the same two places: the heel and the ball of the foot.

• Darn them the moment they go thin, before there is a hole. A thin patch takes five minutes to reinforce and a hole takes twenty to rebuild.
• Turn them inside out to check. The wear shows there first.
• A darn on the heel must be smooth, because a ridge inside a boot becomes a blister within a mile. Weave properly, do not pull tight, and run your thumb over it before you call it done.
• Two thin socks beat one thick one for blisters, and the inner one takes all the wear, which means the one you have to repair is the cheap one.

Knees seats and elbows

Trousers fail at the knee and the seat. Both are worth patching from the inside as soon as they thin, and both are worth reinforcing before they thin at all.

Elbows go on anything worn for work. A patch over the elbow of a jumper or a jacket, in leather or heavy fabric, is a traditional repair because it is a genuinely good one.

The seat is the hardest repair because the fabric is under tension in two directions and the seams meet there. Underpatch generously, well beyond the thin area, and expect to redo it.

Reinforcing before it wears

This is the part that most changes how long clothing lasts, and almost nobody does it.

On any garment going into hard use, reinforce the wear points on day one, while the fabric is at full strength and the repair will hold properly.

• Knees and seat of work trousers: a second layer of fabric stitched inside before anything is thin.
• Pocket corners, which tear from being pulled at. A few backstitches across each top corner.
• Belt loops, which pull off. Restitch them properly before they go.
• Cuffs and hems, which fray. A row of stitching a few millimetres in from the edge holds the weave.
• The bottom of trouser legs, which wear on the heel of the boot. A strip of tape or fabric sewn on the inside back edge is what workwear does and it doubles the life.

This is the single best return in the domain. Ten minutes of stitching on a new garment adds a year to it, and it is the difference between clothing as a consumable and clothing as equipment.

When to stop repairing

Repair is not free, and there is a point where the honest answer is to reassign the garment rather than fix it again.

• When the fabric tears next to the last repair, repeatedly, the cloth has gone rather than the seam.
• When it is thin everywhere, not in one place.
• When the repair would be bigger than the sound fabric.

Then demote it rather than discarding it. Good shirts become work shirts, work shirts become patch material, patch material becomes rags, rags become cleaning cloth and then tinder. A household with a rag bag and a patch bag wastes very little, and the patch bag is where every future repair comes from. See char cloth and firelighters, which is where cotton rag ends its useful life.

Keep the buttons, zips, hooks, elastic and any usable fabric before anything is cut up.