Another Denim Repair

I've been busy working on clothing repairs for the past couple of days, with a desire to seriously pared down the number of items sitting in the Repair Basket in my Sewing Room.  This basket has a tendency to grow and I am admittedly slothful about clearing these items out, as evidenced from a picture I took in 2012.

I'm happy to say the basket is not as full now as it was then, partly because I've also been purging items that were not worth the effort of repairing.  One such item could easily be my daughter's favorite pair of Levi's.  Instead, I spent time today repairing them.

The inside legs of these jeans were badly worn out, and upon inspection I found that this would be the second time I've done some type of repair on them.  So my usual patch job would not do this time.

The crotch area, however, was still in good shape.

I remember seeing this add in the August 2012 issue of InStyle magazine and thought this would be a great way to repair worn out pant and jean legs.

I found another pair of jeans that I decided to save for the fabric as opposed to repairing.  This fabric had the same stretch as the Levi's and would be a nice contrast.  I couldn't, however, take the contrast down the entire leg as shown because there were worn areas on the repair fabric, too.

Then I remembered this Ralph Lauren ad I saved from a Vogue magazine several years ago.  I liked the contrast on the pant legs, which extended just below the pant's knee.

I set about making a pattern to replace the worn area on the Levi's.

I then cut the contrast panel pattern, test-fit it on the worn Levi's leg, added markings to the pattern piece and cut the pattern from the contrast fabric.

I trimmed away bulk in the contrast panels' existing seam lines and 1/2-inch from each upper point.

I pressed under 1/4-inch around the entire contrast panel, applied basting tape to the pressed edges, and pressed the panel in the worn areas.

I top stitched around each panel, and proceeded to turn the legs inside out to cut away the original worn-out areas.  It was then I decided to run a second line of top stitching as reinforcement.

I noticed there were a couple of worn areas which were very close to, if not outside of, the contrast panel's stitch line, so I ironed on a denim reinforcement square on these spots and zig-zagged on those vulnerable areas.

And, here are the repaired Levi's.  Emanne is back on campus and unable to try them on, but I'm hoping to get her virtual "thumbs up" approval when she reads this post.

Be blessed!

Aisha