My Account
Mending with Makers HQ: How to Repair Ripped Clothes with Visible Mending
Makers HQ show us how to use visible mending to repair and extend the life of your favourite clothes.From a perfect pair of jeans to a jacket that you turn to season after season, the clothes we love the most do a lot for us. Over time they may become softened and worn with age, but we believe that our favourite pieces should still last us for years to come.
With this in mind, we’ve partnered with Makers HQ to bring you a series of mending tutorials to extend the life of your go-to pieces.
Makers HQ are a community collaboration based in Plymouth that teach textile manufacturing skills to the local community. Their aim is to reignite and reimagine fashion by providing education and encouraging employment within the industry.
In this step-by-step, Lisa from Makers HQ shows us how to repair a hole with visible mending techniques. Try it for yourself to breathe new life into old favourites and add a unique, creative touch to your clothes.
How to repair ripped clothes with visible mending
Step 1
To start, you’ll need to harvest a small square of material from inside the pocket of your garment – don’t worry, we’ll mend this later. Use scissors to make a snip inside the pocket, not too close to the seam, and cut out a small rectangle of denim.
Step 2
Next, place your patch of material behind the tear and secure it with some matching thread. Use tiny stitches around the edge to hold it in place, then make a few stitches over the top of each other to secure the thread.
Step 3
Using your coloured thread, make some decorative stitches across your tear in different sizes, this makes it less noticeable if your stitches aren’t all the same length. You can always get creative here to make a unique or artistic pattern.
Step 4
Once you’re happy, take your thread through to the back and make a few stitches on top of each other to tie off the thread. Sew just through the patch, taking care not to go through to the front of the garment.
Step 5
Finally, to repair the little patch we took from the pocket, you’ll need a small square of calico or scrap fabric. Sew your patch over the hole using small stitches in a matching thread and finish off by sewing a few stitches on top of each other.
We’d love to see how you get on! Show us your visible mending repairs by mentioning us @seasaltcornwall on Instagram.