Took me four hours to patch a knee hole that should've taken twenty minutes

So I finally got around to fixing my favorite work jeans, the ones with the hole that turned into a full blown rip right above the knee. I thought it'd be a simple iron on patch job, but the fabric around the tear was so frayed and thin that the patch just wrinkled up and peeled off the first time. Then I tried stitching it by hand with a needle and thread, but I used regular cotton thread instead of something stronger, and it snapped on the second pull. Ended up cutting a bigger piece of denim from an old pair my brother gave me, reinforcing the whole area with a sewing machine I borrowed from my neighbor in Wichita. The machine kept jamming because the denim was too thick for the needle, so I had to switch to a heavier denim needle and rethread it like six times. After all that fuss, the final patch actually looks sturdy, but I definitely learned to check the fabric condition first before diving into repairs. Has anyone else spent way too long on a simple fix because the material fell apart worse than expected?

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amymiller2mo ago

Wait, you borrowed a sewing machine from your neighbor in Wichita just to patch some jeans? That's a whole road trip commitment for a knee hole.

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