A Mending I will go......

 First, I wanted to share my adorable view when I got to starting my current sewing project.

My little Missy was just happy to be in same room with me while I worked on things, she likes to trap me where I am by spreading all her stuff out around me!!!

On to my Tutorial:

Mending 

I decided that I needed to get to work on some mending for my older daughter, she is so funny because she knows that I can fix her clothes so she just piles her stuff up when it rips and has them set aside for me to fix.  I guess it's good that she knows that I can fix her clothes instead of thinking they are ruined and we have to throw them away :)

So I had to stitch up the collar on her night gown and fixed it back up for her so she can wear it again.  This was a simple just matching the thread best I could and re-sewing the bias tape down on the collar of the night gown.  The thing that gets me though is this is not the first thing to be mended on this night gown, so glad I didn't pay much for it, but man it's fallen apart a bunch :(

The other thing she had in my to do list was a cute skirt that she got from a friend of ours, the skirt had a slit sort of torn into it on the side.  My daughter was so cute because she saw it and was like mom you can fix this right?!?

this is the slit in the skirt

Well, of course I was willing to figure out how to best fix this for her!  The first thing I did was cut all those extra strings off to make it a clean area to sew over.

Now that it's all nice an cleaned up I did clip as many of the little white threads as I could off too.

This is the back side of where the slit was which is at a nice spot where the fabric overlaps and you can't really see the slit from this side.

Next I pinned the slit closed so that it would be easier to stitch shut.

Set your machine to a zig zag stitch on my machine it was stitch number 5 in the middle and then I set the length to a 1 so it's the shortest distance between stitches and then width I actually readjusted after doing the first line, so I ended up with a 4 width.  (this is why they tell you to do a test stitch on some things first, but I figure it just secured my slit down that much more having stitched it twice.)

Here you can see there is still a little white showing through I could have adjusted the stitch width again to a 5 maybe and it would have fully covered the slit edges to where you didn't see any of it, but I think this looked fine.  I simply zigzagged down the slit twice in my case, but if you get the width to your liking the first time, once would be enough.

This is the inside of the skirt my line is the darker longer line towards the middle of the picture, I think it blends in pretty good on the inside!  Oh and be careful if your skirt has shorts or a liner inside it, that should be moved out of the way when fixing the skirt don't need to sew it too. That's the black fabric you see at the top of the picture these had shorts lining them.

here's the skirt from a bit further away (slit is on right side of picture)

Here's the skirt with where the slit actually sits, I love that it actually fell to the side of the skirt so it's not very noticeable at all!!!!

 So there you have it a quick tutorial on mending torn denim.  This would probably work for torn knees in jeans too, but would be much more noticeable.  My daughter was obsessed with me putting patches on her knees when we got some hand me down jeans that all had holes in the knees so we cut out cute shapes and appliqued them on her pants.

Her favorite pair to wear were the Dinosaurs!!!