Monster Holes

A few days ago I stumbled upon a lovely example of patching holes in the knees. It was mentioned in a forum and as I used to always have a large pile of jeans that needed patching, I got curious and had a look. Here is the page from Zaubertroll who was inspired by an entry from Rasselbande's blog (here it is) and tried it out herself. After seeing the lovely examples I was almost quite sad that I had no pile of trousers lying around to try this idea out on.

But you can always depend on Son #2 to help Mum ;-)

Doing the ironing this morning I found 3(!!) jeans in total that had 1 - 2 holes at the knees. On the one side, dread came up that they definitely needed patching, on the other side was this 'hmm, maybe I should try the idea out now?' thought.

The patching itself was a bit fiddly, as I normally a) patch by hand and b) have the patch as the top layer and not the trousers that are to be patched. After opening the trouser legs at the seams, I cut around the hole that was to be patched and then cut a piece of darker denim that was a bit larger than the hole in the jeans. Using this piece of denim for scale, I then cut the teeth for the monster out of the light blue denim. The eyes were done in the same fashion.

To begin with, I step-stitched the teeth onto the denim mouth opening and the parts of the eye onto each other (as Son #2 ordered for them to be decorated) were attached with a small zig-zag stitch.

The mouth patch was then fixed inside the opened trouser leg (fiddly part) and to begin with I step-stitched close to the edge of the hole (right side at the top) and then again about 5mm to the side. Then, using a larger zig-zag stitch, I went around the edge of the patch from the top side again, as denim does like to fray a bit.

The eyes were placed above the hole and fixed with the small zig-zag stitch around the edge. It is the first time that I have done an 'application design' with the machine. It's not perfect, but it will do for a first. To be honest, I imagined it to look much worse!

To finish up, I step-stitched the original seam top-down twice and then used the overlock to 'tidy it up'. The overlock parts now look neater and more well done than the original seams, so I am quite sure that it will hold.

Son #2 is very happy with his Monster Holes and has the trousers laid out to wear to school tomorrow, so I guess mission accomplished!!