I’m gonna teach you to fix your dang pants

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dog-of-ulthar:

Alright are you DUMMY THICC with POWERFUL THIGHS that keep DESTROYING YOUR JEANS?  Are you super fucking broke and can’t afford new clothes?  Would you rather not contribute to disposable fashion, one of the MOST UNETHICAL industries of the modern age, on which I have many thoughts?  I’m here to show you how to keep your pants on unnatural life support until they literally disintegrate off your legs.

You’ll need some basic sewing skills and supplies.  If you don’t have a sewing machine, jump to the end, I’ll add an epilogue just for you.

Step one: look at this disgrace.  How did this even happen.  What was I doing.

Now you don’t need to do this next bit, especially if it’s a less extensive repair, but I’m going to show you how to make a nice pattern for this, if you like nice patterns.

Turn one leg inside out and put it into the other, so you can see the tear.

Put a piece of paper on the area and trace around the hole - it’ll take some guesswork, but you can figure it out.  You want it big enough to cover the hole, and extending far enough from it that you aren’t just sewing into places where the fabric is worn super thing.  I like to stop at the crotch and inner leg seams, both because the pants are shaped there so it’s hard to get a patch to span it without something puckering, and because it’s a good sturdy anchor to sew to.  Mine looks like this.  Yours will…probably be smaller.

Now cut that shape out of some fabric.  I cut two, because I have similarly shaped holes on both sides.  You do NOT need to add seam allowance.  For the fabric, I recommend cotton twill or canvas (not treated canvas, you don’t want anything plasticky on your crotch).  Twill is what most casual pants are made of (denim is a kind of twill).  Canvas is the same but heavier.  You’ll want something that roughly matches the color of your pants, obviously.  I did not have this.  I decided I do not care.  My pants will look DUMB but I am a GOBLIN.

I serged the edges of mine (because I’m the kind of goblin with a SERGER but not TAN FABRIC?? apparently) but that’s not necessary.  Turn your pants inside out and pin the patch in (one at a time, if you’re doing multiple).  Make sure the patch lies completely flat against the pants fabric, and isn’t bunching or bubbling.

Now shove it under the sewing machine and stitch around the edge.  I recommend sewing right on top of the existing seams where you can, since the pants are sturdy there.  The tricky thing is not accidentally catching other parts of the pants while you’re sewing around the patch, but you can do it, I believe in you.  If you mess up, just seam rip that bit and try again.

Once the patch(es) are in, turn them right side out.  The holes are covered, but there’s a bunch of loose, ragged fabric flapping around that’s just going to keep getting shredded.

So take it back to the sewing machine, and just…sew everywhere.  Start at the edge and make a big spiral to the center.  Or make a bunch of parallel lines.  Or start wherever you want and just go wild.  But fill the patch with stitching everywhere there are two layers of fabric.

This not only keeps the layers together but REINFORCES them, so your sad pants will be STRONGER THAN EVER.  It’ll look like this, and you’ll be like “ew, everybody’s going to see my butt stitching.”

But they won’t.  Trust me.  They won’t.  Because it’s all up in your butt crack, and if they’re looking close enough you’re legally allowed to kick them.  Even with my dumbass fabric choices, you can’t see it at all from the front (enjoy weird blurry shot of my crotch).

And you can barely see it from the back.

AND NOW YOU CAN WEAR YOU FAVORITE PANTS, AND NEVER BUY NEW CLOTHES EVER AGAIN.  I think I’ve done this to EVERY pair of pants I wear on a regular basis.  Some MULTIPLE TIMES.

My note for people without a sewing machine:  you can do this by hand, it’ll just take longer.  Use sturdy thread and sew with a prick stitch (or pick stitch, depending on who you ask).  That means that when the thread is on the outside of the fabric, make the stitches absolutely tiny.  That leaves less surface area to be abraided by the aforementioned slapping of your thighs.  It also looks nicer - so I would do that if you’re fixing some really nice dress pants whether you’ve got a sewing machine or not.  This is what a prick stitch looks like on the outside.

If you’re doing it by hand, and if you want extra reinforcement, I’d also recommend getting some Heat ‘n Bond (or Wonder Under, etc, there are a few different brands, any permanent iron-on adhesive will work) and affixing the patches with that first.  I only didn’t do that because I don’t have any.  I would not recommend putting the patches in ONLY with iron-on adhesive, even though the manufacturers say it will work.  It’s not strong enough for your powerful thighs.

Now go.  Stop buying pants.  End the disposable fashion machine.  The revolution starts with your ass.

This is almost exactly what I do, only this is way nicer. I do mine by hand because then I can do visible mending sashiko-style stitches and it’s very meditative.

My tip is that I try to do some stitching elsewhere on the pants so that if it’s going to be visible, there’s some part of it to look at that isn’t just my crotch. So like, if someone wants to see some of the stitching, I can show them the back pocket or the knee, and not have to just spread my legs and be like LOOK AT MY COOCH. But this method with matchy fabric would probably make it a lot more uhhh subtle. 
(Your picture was not posted)

one hates to be bored

So. Myriad things going on, as ever.
I have resolved that we need a second banjo, since both of us are keeping up on it. I'm quite enjoying it, even if I still can only play three songs and three chords. The teacher advised that since we have one open-back banjo, we should invest in a banjo with a resonator, which is the more usual bluegrass style, and since the picking style we're learning is typical of bluegrass, it makes sense to get a bluegrass-style banjo to go with it. Resonator banjos tend to be more expensive, but like any musical instrument, vary wildly in price and quality.
( banjo nerdery )

So I sort of wish I'd just bought the one at the music shop, but by the time I reached that conclusion, they were closed, and won't open again until Monday.

It was sunny and warm-ish today, so I did laundry and hung it on the line, which I much prefer-- I don't like using the clothes dryer, it prematurely wears stuff out and fades it, but hanging stuff on hangers all over the house is not conducive to having a tidy house, and it's a lot of work and you have to shift them if they wind up, like, on the shower curtain rod or something, and so on. So that was nice. Dude even helped by hanging up a load that finished too late for me to get to it before my class; he never hangs clothes out, so I was quite pleased.

I had a class today-- papermaking, at the Book Arts Center where I crippled myself a couple of years back falling off a flight of stairs (that's how my roller derby career ended, wow that was a while ago now! I should look it up but I'm not gonna, rest assured it was a wild time and if I ponder it more deeply I can say it's got to have been six years ago and i haven't gone down a flight of stairs without thinking twice since that day).
It was a lovely class, with an entertaining teacher and a lot of information and I'm going to have to look into all this in more detail but having seen it now with my eyes, I get it, and my plans for eventual world domination things I could do with dried flowers that aren't potpourri, wreaths, or yet more dried arrangements could come to fruition along with using the flax byproducts that don't turn out good for fabric, so. Cool.
The only downside of the class is that of course there was one man in it, and the man of course had to talk all the time, and while the rest of us were generally cognizant that people had to wait their turn to use the equipment so we should go into each turn we took with some kind of advance plan of what we wanted to do, and our materials ready so that while of course we shouldn't rush, we wouldn't hold up the whole process as we stood around making decisions, but he never seemed to notice at all, and would just stand there with the frame in his hands talking about how he felt about various colors and how his artistic process worked and of course how he was himself an art teacher and had for many years *insert redundant anecdote he'd already told even though we'd only been here an hour* etcetera.
The youngest other student present, a college sophomore, inadvertently threw herself on the grenade of mostly being the one to talk to him by... answering his question about what she was studying. I accidentally started the conversation; she was designing a sheet of paper and admitted it was in her school colors and I said oh what school, and then he was off. So you figure she was like... 20 or 21? He was hugely gray-bearded, I'd estimate 55 at least, and I'm 39, and every other woman was at least 50. So of course he had to find out what her major was and then tell her everything he knew on the topic. Sigh. I kept trying to get back into the conversation with her just to kind of... ease him off a little... but he seemed to honestly not be able to hear me when I spoke, so that was weird.
I guess it's good to know I'm close enough to old to be invisible in that situation.
He also condescended to the instructor about her probably not being old enough to know what her favorite colors were. Her hair was dyed those colors and she was probably close to my age, but she'd mentioned she had two children, one a toddler, and he was like "well you have young kids and that means you're young, your tastes will change as you age because mine did." Like, what the actual.... she is a woman in her thirties or so with a full-time art career and did I mention her hair was dyed those colors? I think she knows her mind.
Whatever, dude!

Anyhow after the class, I dragged Dude out to the ice cream shop with me since I'd missed lunch, and then we went into two different musical instrument shops I mentioned above, and then we went to the cider hall and got a growler to drink this week, which is my blow against disposable containers. Then Dude made dinner, and I realized that I have at least one more Goblin Emperor fic scene to write, and I glanced back at my outline for this story and it's entirely hilariously wrong. HAR. I can't outline for shit, y'all.

(The fic's original premise was Beshelar discovering the hard (HAR) way that he was unbearably attracted to the Emperor by overhearing the royal couple fucking but what actually has happened in this fic is that poor Telimezh is white-knuckling his way through bodyguarding the wedding night and realizing that he's unbearably infatuated with Her Royal Sword Nerd Highness. Meanwhile, Beshelar, totally unfazed by his professional obligation to voyeurism, is instead having a gay crisis over Csevet. This is not in the slightest what I meant, but like, we all have problems as writers, okay.)