I chose a pair of ripped jeans as my item to mend for this assignment. It was a somewhat ironic choice, as they were meant to be ripped in their original form anyway.
While the horizontal rip in the jeans were intentional, and were already there when I received them, the long gash on the left was unintentional and was created when I jammed my foot into the leg-hole. This caused a hanging corner on the knee of my jeans, unfolding and swinging around as I wore it. I decided to try and mend the rip using white and blue embroidery thread.
I sewed around the area of the gash to keep the loose threads in place, and then I created new weft threads with the white embroidery floss. I was able to weave these through the long hanging loose threads on the bottom of the gash, trying to blend the new thread with the old. I initially started with a plain vertical and horizontal weave, trying to just stabilize the fabric from ripping further.
After the denim felt stable enough, I decided to try pattern matching the mended area into the rest of the jeans. However, this wasn’t too successful due to not being able to match the mechanical lines of the jeans’ original weave, and due to the color differences in the threads that I had. I tried to lessen this by mixing two different types of blue, however it is still not quite successful. I do think it’s interesting to see the handsewn patch against the rigid order of the rest of the fabric. It almost seems like a whimsical patch of sky, with the interwoven white and blue strands. What’s also interesting to think about is that even if I mended the entirety of the hole in these jeans with this same method, I think they would still be called “ripped jeans.”