I Can Mend a Hole in a Back Pocket Three Different Ways. This is My First Favorite!

Just as I promised, here’s my other favorite way to mend a hole in a back pocket!

I’ve got two favorite ways to mend a hole in a back pocket (and a third way that I don’t like as much but that also works great!), and recently, my kid presented me with a pair of pants that had a hole in each back pocket, allowing me to put my two favorite methods into direct competition. She keeps her phone in one back pocket and her wallet in the other, so as a bonus, the holes are nearly symmetrical and nearly identical. It’s the perfect scenario for an experiment!

With the kid’s permission, I mended one hole with a patch on the outside, and one hole with a patch on the inside. Both methods require the same materials and take approximately the same amount of time. They’re also both very easy, with the trickiest part of the outside patch the folding and creasing, and the trickiest part of the inside patch its placement. I showed you how to do the outside patch last week, so this time, let’s discuss the inside patch!

This inside patch method involves just what it says: instead of patching the outside of the hole, you’ll be patching the inside of the hole. The patch will still show through the hole, but will be far less visible than a patch outside the hole would be. What WILL be pretty visible–depending on thread color!–is all the reinforcement stitching that stabilizes the hole and keeps the patch attached. Depending on your goals and your skill set, the stitching can be messy (but effective!) or highly decorative.

Here’s what you need to complete this mend:

Materials

• patch. Match the weight of the existing fabric, but otherwise the choice is up to you! If you match the patch fabric very well, the patch will be quite inconspicuous, but a visible patch can be really cute, too.
• thread. This is the most visible part of this mend, so your choice is very important here. Well-matched thread color will be nearly invisible, but you also can do such cute things with visible mending.
• cutting and sewing supplies. This is a hand-sewing project, so requires a hand-sewing needle and thread scissors. Pins are helpful, but optional. You don’t particularly need an iron, and you definitely don’t need fusible interfacing, although you can use it it–just keep it away from the hole itself!

Step 1: Prep and place the patch.

Cut the patch to be wider than the hole in both length and width, then insert it into the back pocket and place it behind the patch. This is the trickiest part of the whole project, since you have to make sure that the patch sufficiently overlaps the hole, and you have to do it mostly by feel.

Once the patch is in place, you can pin it to make sure it stays secure, but it should stay very well even without pinning. If you do pin, make sure that you haven’t caught the inside of the pants with your pin–the last thing you want to do is sew your pocket shut!

Step 2: Hand-stitch the patch in place.

This is the fun–and a little bit time-consuming!– part!

Thread your needle with the thread you’ve chosen, and then simply begin to stitch the patch to the pocket. Focus on stabilizing the hole, particularly the raw edges of the hole, but stitch over the entire patch area, the more stitches, the better. Every stitch that you put in, however messily, strengthens the fabric and reinforces the mend.

When you’re finished hand-sewing, turn the pocket inside-out and trim away any excess patch material, being careful not to cut through any of your stitching.

I asked my kid for her final opinion (since these are her pants, lol!), and she said that she liked the look of the inside patch better, but thought that the outside patch was fine, too. I will say that the inside patch seems less visible from a distance, but these grey jeans were tricky to match, and if I’d been able to match the outside patch fabric perfectly to the pants it might well be just as inconspicuous.

For what it’s worth, I volunteer monthly with my local public library to mend items that patrons bring in, and I use the inside patch method almost exclusively during Mending Days. It’s especially easy when someone needs a mend in the knee or thigh, since I can use the zigzag stitch on my sewing machine to do alllll that stitching in just a few seconds. If it’s a rip that I’m mending, not a hole, often the patch isn’t visible at all afterwards, and if I happen to have a thread color that perfectly matches the fabric, the stitching is barely visible, as well.

Which method do YOU prefer?

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I Am My Younger Child's Bespoke Seamstress, and Other Adventures in Parenting College Students

To be fair, serving as my kid's bespoke seamstress is high-key my favorite thing EVER. All I apparently really want with my life is for people to want me to sew things for them.

And the little kid, at least, is happy to oblige!

First, some mending:

I don't know if it's secret sensory issues or just the fact that I raised picky parsnips, but both kids have the absolute worst time trying to find clothes they like. I lecture often on how many pants and shirts, etc., ought to make up a minimum wardrobe, and yet both kids regularly go off to college with half that and then bitch that all their clothes are constantly falling apart.

Like, YEAH, if you're wearing and therefore washing a garment all the time, it's obviously going to wear out more quickly! THIS IS WHY YOUR MOTHER TOLD YOU TO BRING MORE CLOTHES TO SCHOOL!

And don't even get me started about coats. One kid insists that she has not and will not ever find a coat she likes, and pretty much just layers infinite hoodies. In a Philadelphia winter, no less. I've told her that at some point her professors are going to decide that she must be too impoverished to buy herself a coat and take up a collection, and she'll wake up one morning to find that they've put a gift bag with a brand-new coat in it outside her dorm room door. It won't be to her taste, but she'll nevertheless have to wear it until graduation lest she seem ungrateful.

The other kid does have a single coat that she approves of enough to wear--not that it's warm enough for her own Ohio winters, but whatever--but over Winter Break one day I got too close to the kid while she was wearing it, and I was all, "...do you ever wash this thing?"

"Sometimes," she said.

"How?"

"Cold and Delicate, like the label says."

I said, "Yeah... no," and then wrestled it off her. Girl was wearing this thing not only to class every day, but also to the horse barn twice a week and the Humane Society once a week, not to mention on environmental science field trips and throughout all the other horrors of college life. And then she was barely washing it, because the label said she had to treat it fancy!

Like, it's a COAT, Bro. And not even a puffer coat. It can take a little bit of temperature. I soaked it for a day in hot water with a half-cup of Biz stirred in, closed inside my cooler to keep the water hot. I will not describe to you the state of the water when I finally drained it, but it was something. Afterwards, I stuffed it inside a mesh laundry bag and washed it on Warm and Regular with two rinses with my regular laundry detergent, more Biz, a half-cup of ammonia, and a fistful of citric acid in the rinse compartment because I have the hardest water on the planet. 

Let me tell you that this coat was squeaky clean when it got done. Not a whiff of horse or dog or polluted creek to be found! The faux fur was a little stiff after air drying, but after I went over it with a lint rake it was also soft and fluffy again. 

This is your sign to become as obsessed with the r/laundry subreddit as I am.

Along with the mending and the laundry, I actualized the little kid's dream of stitching just the sleeves of a long-sleeved T-shirt inside the sleeves of a short-sleeved T-shirt, so that the kid could get the layered T-shirt look without having to wear layered T-shirts on her body:

*cough, cough* sensory issues *cough*

I thought the stitch lines ended up a little too visible to fool anyone, but the kid said she liked it, so whatever.

My biggest sewing project, though, was for a kid who I don't even know yet!

In the younger kid's first care package of the school year, I sent her and her roommates a set of hoodies that I'd appliqued with their school name in their class colors. I'm VERY chuffed that all the kids seem to love them, and even more chuffed that when I offered to make a similar hoodie for the younger kid's Hell Child (it's a school thing, don't worry about it) in that kid's class colors, the younger kid was super enthusiastic about it.

So I thrifted a hoodie, double-checked the one I'd made for the kid so I could remember how on earth I'd made it--

I've asked the kid several times if the loose threads are an issue, because I'd worried they wouldn't like it, but she says that all the hoodie recipients are super into that look. So yay!

--and then made a red version for the kid's baby red!

I used Heat n' Bond instead of Pellon for this project (I miss you, Joann's!), and although I'm worried it won't wear as well as the Pellon, omg it was SO much easier to apply.

Honestly, I think it turned out even cuter than the blue version, thanks to the matching hoodie color:

And now the kids are back at school for the Spring semester, and I have nobody to sew for but boring old me, sigh. I did impulse buy this giant bow pattern so I can make a giant Valentine's bow that I do not need but will nevertheless decorate my front door with, so that will keep me entertained for a few evenings, I guess.

Spam me with all your ideas for where I can put giant bows!

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I Can Mend a Hole in a Back Pocket Three Different Ways. This is My Second Favorite.

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Mend that hole in your back pocket with an easy patch stitched to the outside.

Solve this debate for me!

If you want to fix a hole in the back pocket of a pair of pants, and you DON’T want to take the entire pocket off to do it, there are two main methods: patch the outside of the pocket, or patch the inside of the pocket.

Both are easy enough to do start to finish within an hour (or one episode of The Pitt, if that’s how you’re measuring time, ahem). Both require the same hand-sewing skills–which is hardly any, lol! The outside patch requires folding down its raw edges, which is fiddly, but the inside patch requires placing the patch while it’s inside a pocket, which is fiddly. The outside patch has a more visible patch, but the inside patch has more visible stitching.

I never can work out which I like better, and whenever I do this mend for someone else, I feel like they’re generally pretty evenly split, as well–some people really like the outside patch, and some people really like the inside one.

So I’m going to show them both to you, and YOU’RE going to decide which one is better!

First up: here’s how to patch the outside of a back pocket.

Materials

You will need:

• patch. For this project, the patch consists of a piece of similar material and weight, a couple of inches longer in both dimensions than the hole.
• matching thread. Use regular sewing thread that matches the patch and/or the pants.
• iron. This will help you crease the edges of the patch that you fold in.
• sewing supplies. Scissors, pins, etc.

Step 1: Prep the patch.

I didn’t end up using the patch, above, because I came to my senses and realized that it’s the correct weight but it doesn’t match AT ALL, but it at least gives you an idea about what size the patch should be in relation to the hole.

Fold all sides of the patch to the wrong side, then iron to crease. This will hide the raw edges of the patch.

Optional, but you can take a few minutes at this point to tack the folds down on the patch. It’s not necessary and I didn’t do it, but it will keep the folds in place while you stitch the patch over the hole, and that can be very helpful.

Step 2: Hand-sew the patch over the hole.

You barely have to know how to sew to do this mend!

Start by placing the patch, folds down, over the hole. Center the hole under the patch so it’s well-covered. You can pin it in place, but it’s not super necessary.

Baste the patch to the pocket just to keep it in place, and to tack the folds in place if you didn’t do that in the previous step. A running stitch is fine for this.

After the patch is basted, your entire job is simply to stitch the snot out of that patch. The more stitches, no matter how sloppy and amateur, the better! A running stitch is fine, and so is a back stitch. Heck, you could just do a bunch of French knots if you wanted! The idea is simply to reinforce the fabric around that hidden hole and to keep the patch in place, and every stitch, no matter how messy, is a stitch that will do just that.

You do have to be VERY careful that you sew through ONLY that back pocket and patch, and not also through the back of the pants. This requires keeping a hand inside the pocket as you sew, and, at least based on my personal experiences, also requires pricking yourself at least four times. Fun fact: hydrogen peroxide is a champ for getting blood out of clothing!

You also want to make sure that you’re stitching enough around the edges that the patch won’t come loose or the creases unfolded, but if you’re laying down as many stitches as I’m telling you to, that won’t be an issue. I’m serious: sew for a WHOLE ENTIRE episode of The Pitt!

Even though you’re not repairing the actual hole, as such, this mend works because you’re stabilizing the hole, reinforcing the fabric around it, and strengthening the entire area. Every stitch you put in is one more bit of strength you’re adding.

If you love to hand-stitch and/or you’re very good at it, check out sashiko mending for this project. You can make some beautiful patterns with your stitches, as visible or invisible as you’d prefer.

For even more visible mending fun, play with thread color and fabric color and shape. I don’t recommend double-sided fusible interfacing for this project, unless it’s little scraps that you’re using instead of basting, but that shouldn’t stop you from cutting your patch into a cute shape, because you’ll be stitching it down with lots and lots of stitches.

When that episode of The Pitt is finished, you’ll have a sturdy patch on the outside of your back pocket. Stay tuned for next week, when I show you how to sew a sturdy patch on the INSIDE of your back pocket, and then you can see which one you like better!

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10 Witch Hats for Halloween... Just Not Necessarily *This* Halloween

One improvement that I could easily make to my little hobby etsy shop is to anticipate seasonality.

Like, I'm literally the one who bitched every single year of my kid's Nutcracker years about why on earth the ballet department always acted like they had to reinvent the entire damn Nutcracker wheel every damn year. Y'all, you have done this thing before! Why is the children's dressing room never reserved and nobody has the elevator key and casting a dozen nine-year-olds in the same roles they held when they were eight takes three freaking weeks of daily emails saying that the casting will be out tomorrow? And yet here I am every year being all, "Oh, gorsh! Is Halloween month! Should I... make something Halloween for my etsy shop?" And then I have time to make maybe three things before Halloween is over.

Also me, sitting here on November 18 with nothing in my shop for Thanksgiving and nothing in my shop for Christmas

But you know what I DO have in my shop right now? The five handmade witch hats that I finished AFTER Halloween! The five that I managed to bust out before Halloween sold so quickly that I figured that this time I would get ahead of the game while I was thinking about it and my mind and my hands were already in witch hat mode.

I really like this hat that I fussy cut from a thrifted batik of the seven chakras:

I also got through quite a bit of previously thrifted formalwear for those pre-Halloween witch hats--

--as well as a successful experiment with facing a witch hat with burlap:

My big helper here just happened to be home for Fall Break right when I needed a witch hat model!

--but my absolute favorite hats, and the ones that I ended up making multiples of to get that jump on next Halloween, are these hats sewn from the last scraps of a vintage cutter quilt that I've had kicking around my fabric stash for over 15 years by now:

I'm a little sad to have used it all up with these hats, because I've never come across another old cutter quilt since, but I suppose that we mustn't hoard our resources, sigh.

It just sews up SO prettily!

These last four witch hats sewn from that vintage quilt are already listed in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, because who am I to tell you no if you want to buy one in the off-season--

--but what I really should do, and what I am firmly telling myself TO do, is to sew a couple more hats from unique fabrics every month, so that by the time next autumn rolls around I'll be fully stocked with seasonal items.

But not this week. This week my goal is to figure out how to sew re-usable fabric chains, probably with Velcro fasteners, because I think it would make a really cool--and eco-friendly! And heirloom!--holiday decoration. And obviously I won't figure that out and have any sets finished until it's past time to reasonably decorate for Christmas, sooo... I guess I'm really committed to getting a jump on next year's holiday products!

P.S. Want to see what we're going to do with a bushel of apples, a gallon of cider, and two Jack-o-lantern pumpkins, one very large and one very weird? Follow along on my Craft Knife Facebook page, where cider cocktails and caramel apples are made, and teenagers are in charge of the applesauce!

Sometimes the Care Packages are Blue

Do not even try to imagine how tickled I was when I figured out I could send each of my kids a corny, pun-themed care package that matched the color of the college merch that I could make for them, because your imagination will not even come close to how tickled I actually was.

The big kid's first care package this year (We al-RED-y miss you!) contained not just Twizzlers and Pringles but a decorative pillow for her apartment couch complete with a handmade appliqued red and white school logo on it. The little kid's care package, however, looked like this:

--and in it she got cookies and cream Pocky, seaweed snacks, blue shark gummies, and the result of a lot of careful fussy cutting with my Cricut, a lot of careful applique--

--and then a lot more of even more careful applique on top of it:

Because I always wanted more daughters and because this kid and her freshman year roommates are still as close as puppies in a pile, I obviously thrifted three hoodies and made three versions of the school applique so that they could each have one.

Two sets of applique are on these sort of off-white hoodies--and honestly, if you're buying hoodies brand-new you're playing a sucker's game, because there are five billion like-new hoodies out there in the thrift stores to be had for just a few bucks each--

The loose threads are a feature, not a bug. I was going for the raw edge look, but I also interfaced the snot out of every piece so nothing is going nowhere, fingers crossed and knock on wood.

--but my own girl is still going hard on the mostly black wardrobe (I suppose that on a granular level it's a very far cry from her preschool years, when she insisted upon wearing only a succession of thrifted party dresses, but since her taste in her wardrobe is still exactly that specific I kind of see it as overall pretty much the same thing), and so whenever I make them their triplet gifts, it's always two creams or pastels and one emo black:

She can just tell her classmates that she's embodying Lantern Night every night!

But an outfit for her first May Day? Now THAT was a pickle to figure out...

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In Which I Violate the IP of My Kid's College To Make Her Custom Merch

So yes, I DID violate the IP of the kid's college by recreating their school logo in fabric and appliqueing it to a decorative pillowcase, buuuuuut I also own several pieces of properly licensed merchandise purchased from the school bookstore, AND by the time she graduates I'll have paid the school far more than my own personal net worth in tuition.

So let's just call it fair, yes?

I cut and assembled the patchwork applique D during my mending group's monthly volunteer day at our local public library, in between mending holes in several pairs of leggings, teaching a child a couple of different hand-sewing stitches, and patching holes and rips in what I believe to be every pair of ripped jeans in the county:

I finished satin stitching the pieces of the D later that night at home, forgetting that I still had a heavy-duty jeans needle installed in my sewing machine until I was halfway done so that now I'm rightfully paranoid that the pillowcase is going to rip at the edges of the satin stitching, sigh:

The stitching looks so tidy and the colors are well-matched, though! And if the fabric does split where the heavy-duty needle was punching through it, well... the kid knows when and where our local public library's Mending Day happens!

I also made the envelope-back pillowcase from scratch:

I perhaps shouldn't have trusted the label on the pillow form that indicated that it was a perfect square, 16"x16". I crafted my pillowcase to match, and the vertical measurement of the finished product seems to agree with the label, but the horizontal measurement clearly does not. Look how snug it is at the sides, dang it!

Whatever. Maybe it just needs to be punched some more to redistribute the stuffing... as long as that doesn't cause the fabric to rip at the satin stitching.

Gentle punching, then.

On the long drive to drop the younger kid off at school this August, I amused everyone in the car by reading them posts from the various college parent Facebook groups that I lurk in. There are a LOT of moms crashing out on public Facebook groups about their crippling grief and loneliness, y'all. And there are a LOT of college freshmen, apparently, calling their parents crying and asking to come home before their parents can even finish driving back after dropping them off. One mom reported that her daughter called an Uber and came knocking on their hotel room door in the middle of the night and telling them she didn't want to stay. Like, Baby, they JUST dropped you off! Unless your roommates are actively worshipping Satan, and by that I mean not just putting on the robes and painting the pentagrams and lighting the black candles but, like, actually calling up a physical incarnation of the Prince of Darkness himself and offering you to him as his bride, you really need to sit with your discomfort for at least a semester. And if you can hold out for one semester, see if you can try for two. 

Honestly, even if the kid's entire college looked exactly like that abbey from The Nun, I'd still be all, "Honey, you can stick out a demon nun for four years. She's the leading researcher in her field! See if you can TA for her and get her to write you a recommendation letter for your grad school application."

Anyway, all that to say that I am now following a Facebook group devoted to sending themed care packages with punny slogans to one's college kid:

And along with the Twizzlers, spiced apple foaming hand soap, snack-sized Pringles, and Stranger Things-themed Chips Ahoy cookies, a decorative pillow with a half-red school logo fit in just perfectly!

Now to figure out what pun I want to use for this month's Halloween-themed care package...

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I Want To Smoosh This Rainbow Unicorn Pillow Into My Face While I Scream

From happiness, of course! Because LOOK at it!

This pillow was a birthday present for my niece, who is at the perfect age for rainbow unicorns, and whose bedroom, when I visited this summer, looked like a rainbow unicorn threw up all over it, but in, like, the best of ways. 

My bedroom looks like a 1980s yard sale had a fight with a tornado and they both took turns throwing up afterwards. I should dust, and I really should declutter.

So I knew I wanted to sew the kid something rainbow unicorn (I got the feeling from looking at her bedroom that anything from Disney or having to do with construction equipment would also work, but I was really personally feeling the rainbow unicorn vibes), but it took a while to settle on what I wanted to make. Maybe a little unicorn stuffie with a rainbow yarn mane? A much bigger unicorn stuffie with a tubby little tummy VERY stuffed with fluffies? This hat is stinking adorable, but I JUST finished using up almost all the fleece in my fabric stash and I loathe the idea of collecting more. I didn't feel like learning paper piecing for this project, but it was seriously getting on my nerves that all the paper piecing rainbow unicorn projects were so pretty!

I kept coming back to this Lisa the Unicorn quilt block pattern, and eventually I convinced myself that it wouldn't be as tricky to piece as it looked, and that its giant (26"x26"!) size would work as a giant decorative pillow after the big kid pointed out that this is literally the standard Euro pillow size that she's used on her bed for years and the last time I bought her a new pillow didn't I bitch that I could only buy them in packs of two and so I'd just have a second big-ass pillow kicking around my linen closet for years on end?

My memory is NOT a steel trap, but I do tend to at least vaguely recall my bitchiest moments, so I did sort of remember the entire bitchfest that was shopping for the kid's first college stuff. I checked Amazon, and indeed, back in 2022, just in time for college dorm shopping, I did buy two ridiculously big-ass 26"x26" pillows (See? I even remember the content of my bitching!), and when I dug back into the dark depths of my linen closet I DID find a brand-new 26"x26" pillow insert still in its packaging. I also found a brand-new throw pillow insert in a packaging meant for two that I have NO memory of what I could have possibly done with the first pillow, but now I can make the big kid a cute throw pillow cover for the couch in her college apartment, and omg I have so much room in my linen closet!

I had a LOT of help picking out the rainbow unicorn colors of the mane--

 

--and I think this is the first project in which I've actually had to label all my pieces to keep them straight:

Although I'm sure it actually didn't, it felt like cutting out all the pieces took a LOT longer than it did to sew them all together. The piecing felt like it went really quickly, and it came together so nicely!

It took long enough, though, that while I worked I watched almost the entire first season of Vikings, before deciding I didn't really like it all that much and bailed, so then I rediscovered a long-ago old favorite, the Double Love podcast, so I sewed all the rest of my unicorn listening to Jessica's machinations and Elizabeth's justifiable dithering over whether or not she actually even likes Todd:

Just between us, Todd deserves better, and I don't even like him!

Fortunately, it was summer when I sewed this, so I had my living captives adult children home and could make them come admire every new part I pieced. It just kept getting cuter and cuter!

Here it is completely pieced and ready to quilt! I was stoked to use stash batting leftover from my flannel foster kid quilt, but ugh, I really need to find a nice, big bolt of a good cotton-poly blend batting that I can just pull from forever. Lmk if you ever run across a good sale!

And here she is all quilted and ready to be sewn into a pillow cover! I don't like the look of a lot of quilting, but just between us I probably should have put at least one more line of quilting, maybe some stitch in the ditch, in the unicorn's face. Hopefully it won't fall apart after a few washes...

Every summer, a few random and stupid things around our house break, and it always takes us FOREVER to fix them. One year, it was the dryer. One year, it was the oven. One memorable year, it was the entire fucking roof. We've had summers of multi-day power outages and summers in which one car or another just would not stay working. Anyway, this summer it's the riding lawnmower AND the dryer. Working in concert and only spending about twice as much money as we probably needed to, my partner and I finally got the riding lawnmower fixed-ish, provided you agree that stripping a couple of wires, twisting them together, and wrapping the whole thing in electric tape is "fixed," but guess what still isn't working?

Tbh I'm not personally even that mad because hanging laundry to dry is eco-friendly and makes it smell awesome, but the kids were beyond over it by the end of the summer, and probably the only kids at their colleges excited to get back to school so they could do laundry. 

At some point before the weather really kicks in I'm going to have to buckle down and watch one thousand How To Repair Your Electric Dryer YouTube videos, but that day was not this day, and so Lisa the Rainbow Unicorn got to dry prettily on a line in my front yard:

My partner didn't know this so you might not either, but quilting is supposed to be wrinkly and scrunchy after the first wash. Those scrunches are what make it comfy!

And then she got to put her pillow on and pose prettily in that same front yard!

I am so pleased with how she turned out! The instructions were, indeed, complicated, and I highlighted a lot and checked steps off as I completed them, but if you followed them carefully, nearly everything comes out perfectly and all your seams line up just where they should. 

I'd like to make another Lisa the Unicorn as a wall hanging, perhaps with a colorway of blacks and greys, but that's currently pretty far down my list. First I've got to embellish hoodies with the name of the kid's school done in patchwork for her and her best college buddies, then make the other kid a throw pillow, then I need some new pajama pants since that's all I seem to wear these days so I might as well lean into it, and then this ghost patchwork quilt is honest to god SHOUTING my name at me, and then by that time I'll probably have thrifted a couple more hoodies that I can put patchwork ghosts on, too, and by that time I'll need to be thinking about sewing Christmas presents for people.

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