A friend I saw this morning had put a hole in her leggings. When I said that she would have to get a needle out and mend the hole, she was horrified, and said she'd just get a new pair.
I spent 3 hours mending holes in jeans with decorative patches and bondaweb last week for the girls, and saved £50-80.
Do you make do and mend, or throw it out?
Bev

I mend most things, but I must admit that I DO "customize" a lot of things-that is, "fix" things that aren't broken, and really don't need any alteration my gran was a really strong influence when I was little though, and she was of the "make do and mend" mentality, so I'd like to think I got it from her

I told them I had customized their jeans so they didn't turn their noses up at them

Yes, I mend, although I hate doing socks! I do bother with seams and buttons and things like that, and I can do a fairly neat darn if I need to. Sometimes customize too - good fun.

We mend and customise everything here in this particular student house! My best friend has a sewing machine, so... (She's also very good a making a cape at short notice. )

She just needs a good dose of poverty. A few months with no job, no income, and no-one around to bail her out should do the trick.

I disagree. Clothes are so cheap now that often it is more expensive to mend them. My son's trousers had a hole in the knee and I wanted to buy a patch to cover it. The patch cost more than the 5 euro trousers I saw in the sale to replace them. I mend more expensive stuff though!

I do mend my jeans but things like socks and leggings, they are sometimes much cheaper to buy new (particularly if they are fairly worn and likely to have another hole in them pretty soon!) Also, I consider my time "expensive", so if it takes only minutes to mend some thing, I'll do it but I won't spend hours customising anything

I thought ripped jeans were 'in'!!

I have to make a couple of points here:

The only reason clothes are so cheap these days is that they are made in the Far East by slave labour (or next to it).

You don't buy patches to repair something. You use material you have saved from an old worn out garment.

My Basil said, couldn't I make the hole more designer looking?



Yes, I had some squares of patchwork fabric that I used to patch the jeans, and cut the legs off another pair to make shorts too. I felt good after I'd done them.

My fixing skills are usually needed for Sonny Jim's stuff (even though he's nearly 16). In the last few months he's managed to open the seam on his school blazer and on his waterproof top coat for school so I have fixed and patched up accordingly.

Don't tend to customise stuff too much, although I have a plain white blouse that I'm pondering on putting some braid round. Daughter often gives me impossible things to mend - favourite trousers that have been mended twice and are really beyond it . On the other hand she can be extravagant buying new tops .

I find boys' trousers, particularly tracksuits used for football and the like are specially trying and vividly remember patching, patching, and then taking off those patches when they wore through and putting new patches on - starting again as it were - not because I'm mean but because I knew that a new pair of tracksuit btms would go through within a week. Am glad those days are over.

In theory we patch and mend everything possible - from clothes to vegetable racks, to office chairs.
The door of our clothes dryer gave up a couple of years ago and we were told couldn't be replaced - we would have to buy a new one. So my partner invented a new system for hinging the door and the machine still works perfectly.

We patch and mend clothes whenever possible. But the minus side is that this does leave to saving everything from bits of jeans material to nuts and bolts because "it might be useful" and that leads to using up too much space. There is also the time problem. I am guilty of material waste when it comes to a choice between that and saving time.

I patch my sons' jeans. They don't mind a bit of ripping here and there, but like patches if tears are too big or are in an embarassing place I use an old pair of OH's jeans that he is never going to fit into again. If the rip isn't too big, I sew the patch on the inside, and then blanket stitch around the rip on the outside to stop it fraying. They like this because it looks like jeans they've seen for sale where this had been done to them beforehand. So now the repaired jeans look as though I could've bought them looking like that

As to my own clothes, I cut sleeves shorter when cuffs on long-sleeved t-shirts have lost their shape, and if I think 3/4 length sleeves will look right, and I often change buttons on coats, jackets, cardis...... I'll replace the odd zip, mend pockets etc and have embroidered over moth holes or tiny rust marks - it tends to depend whether I think there's enough life in the garment to warrant the time spent reviving it, or whether I'm particularly fond of it.

I have vivid memories of my mother darning my woolly school tights. She used dark brown wool for darning, which was fine when the tights were dark brown, but not quite so glam when they were beige

I can mend things, and if they are of particular value to me, I will do so, but no, I don't patch everything. My own time is also at a premium here, and I have to decide how to apportion it: a rip in jeans can be patched, sure, but it generally means the fabric round about the tear is also weakened and threadbare and will not hold onto a patch so terribly well. I'll put fabric waste into the recycling instead.
For other jobs, again it depends what it is. I don't have everything new for the sake of it, but if a thing is ugly and splintery or rusty or its functioning is dodgy, I'll replace it when the ugliness/splinteriness/dodginess begins to annoy me, and get irritated when my husband says oh, but if we only do x y or z with it it'd have another five years' life in it - x, y or z being some project of several days' labour and uncertain outcome. I'm thinking here of the shelving unit which was a utility piece in the nineteen fifties, which could look nicer if stripped back, primed, painted, sanded, repainted...but still won't match our needs quite as well as the thing I saw online or in a shop...to me that effort would just not be worth my while.

We've a shop locally that sells jeans for £5 so I'm afraid we just buy a new pair

I have to make a couple of points here too:
It's very difficult to find clothes that aren't made in the far east! I do avoid brands which have a bad reputation though.

I didn't have anything suitable for mending cord so I wanted to buy a patch with a pic on it.