Mend It: Patches and Repairs

this course is free because mending is the front door of the whole craft. it needs no machine for four of its five repairs, the kit costs less than one garment it will save, and the payback starts the first evening. if it leaves you wanting the machine skills, the sewing path this course belongs to starts one course back and runs all the way to making your own clothes.

everything below fits in a biscuit tin, which is traditional and correct.

The first question: thread or fabric?

every repair starts with the same diagnosis. if the thread failed and the fabric is sound (a popped trouser seam, a hem come down, a button gone), the fix is re-sewing along the original lines: quick, invisible, permanent. if the fabric itself failed (a knee worn through, a moth hole, a tear), no amount of stitching thin air will hold, and the repair means adding material (a patch), rebuilding material (a darn), or accepting the garment's retirement to the rag bag with honour.

The second question: how far does the weakness run?

hold the damage up to a window. worn fabric glows thin well beyond the visible hole, and that whole glow is the repair zone. patches anchor 2–3cm into sound cloth beyond it; darns start and finish in firm yarn. repairs that fail almost always failed because they were sized to the hole instead of the wear.

The third question: does it show?

a repair inside a pocket bag needs to be strong and nothing else. a repair on a jumper's front is a design decision: match it and hide it, or contrast it and own it. both are respectable. what does not work is the halfway house, a slightly-wrong colour pretending to be invisible.

five real repairs, easiest first. the whole step is hand sewing except the jeans, where a machine helps but a thimble and patience also finish the job.

1. The button (five minutes)

the gateway repair, covered stitch-by-stitch in the sew-a-button side quest: anchor, six passes over a matchstick, wind the shank, bury the knots. do one tonight from the mixed jar even if nothing needs a button, to put the motion in your hands.

2. The popped seam (ten minutes)

turn the garment inside out and find where the stitching ends on each side of the gap. hand backstitch along the original seam line, starting and ending 2cm into the surviving stitching. on trouser seats and underarms, sew the line twice. this is the highest-value ten minutes in this course: popped seams retire more clothes than holes do.

3. The fallen hem (fifteen minutes)

press the hem back into its crease first. slip stitch inside the fold: travel the needle a centimetre inside the hem fold, surface to catch one or two threads of the garment, back into the fold. from outside, nothing. the pressing is half the repair, as ever.

4. The darned jumper (half an hour)

fabric over the mushroom, snug not stretched. anchor in sound yarn beyond the thin zone, lay parallel threads across the hole (the ladder), then weave across them over-under, alternating each row, packing gently with the needle. matching wool disappears; contrast wool is a feature. socks are the same repair on a smaller planet.

5. The jeans knee (an evening)

the full repair, combining everything. trim the hole's ragged edge. cut a denim patch from the hemming course offcuts, 3cm bigger than the worn glow on every side, and tack it behind the hole. from the front, sew rows of stitching back and forth across the whole worn zone, catching patch and garment together: by machine with the jeans needle, or by hand in sashiko-style running stitch rows. the repair is a quilted plate of new-and-old fabric that outlasts the rest of the jeans.

somewhere in the last century, a mended garment started reading as poverty rather than sense, and clothes became disposable. that has reversed. visible mending, contrast darns, sashiko rows, patches that announce themselves, is now the opposite signal: this garment was worth keeping, and someone had the skill to keep it.

the craft point is that visible mending is the same techniques as invisible mending with braver thread choices, so everything in step 3 is already the toolkit. the hand embroidery course, next in this path, turns those functional stitches decorative, which is where repair and ornament stop being different subjects.

• Repair What You Wear (YouTube): a channel devoted entirely to clothing repair, from buttons to complex darns, at genuine beginner pace
• Tom of Holland: the mender most associated with the visible mending movement; his Visible Mending Programme reframed repair as craft
• Evelyn Wood (YouTube): hand-stitch repairs with a tailor's standards, including slip stitch hem fixes filmed properly close