When my mended pair of jeans needed to be repaired again, I knew it was time to let them go. I patched them after a year of wear and then wore them for another year.

Nothing lasts forever, unfortunately, and while I could have mended these jeans for a second time, I just wasn’t feeling comfortable wearing them. I tend to wear out my jeans in the crotch. So, visible repairs are in an awkward place and I certainly don’t want to draw attention to my crotch! The layered fabric in the crotch creates a different kind of discomfort—it’s physically uncomfortable.

I took photos of these jeans when I originally mended them. The date linked is March of 2022. I estimate that I wore them for a year before they needed repair. I wore them for two years: one year as-is and a second year patched. Full disclosure: I am on sabbatical from working outside the home. A lot of days I just don’t leave home—I can get away with wearing the same clothes every day, from week to week. I wore these jeans multiple days per week for two years straight. Conservatively, I’ll say I wore them only 2 days per week. Let’s do some math!

52 + 52 = 104 weeks in the 2 years I wore them

104 x 2 = 208 days worn

I do laundry once a week. They were washed 104 times.

208 days of wear. 104 washes. Now, they’re done.

That’s pretty good and beats NPR’s LifeKit’s suggestion that you wear an article of clothing 30 times.

I learned a lot from this pair of pants. First, there’s a lot of stretch in these jeans. Look at how they wore out. It’s amazing how much the wear looks like stretch marks on skin.

Second, I think the stitching frayed and broke because I mended these jeans while they were clean. There’s a difference in the fabric when it’s freshly washed and when it has been worn a couple of times.

The next pair of jeans, I will wear them a day or two before mending. Then, I’ll be stitching on fabric at its maximum stretched size, not at a shrunken size.

Finally, I’m not sure I’ll heave the whole pair into the trash bin. I’m going to try part them out—I’ll try to take out the zipper and maybe cut out swatches of relatively unworn fabric on the legs for future mending or other projects. All in all, eventually everything has to go. While only having this pair of jeans for two years seems paltry, after doing the math, I realize that I actually got a lot of wear out of them. Now it’s time to put them to rest.

The buttonhole on my husband’s jeans frayed, so it was too large to securely hold the button. I was able to mend the hole, but it wasn’t without trial and error.

When the buttonhole on a pair of my husband’s jeans frayed so much that it could no longer hold the button securely, I offered to give mending them a try. I ran into some snags throughout the process, but I was able to do it.

First, I reinforced the area with a scrap of quilting cotton. I sewed a patch on the front and back of the waistband over the buttonhole. Then, I put in a few rows of running stitches where the frayed hole was since this area really only had the two layers of cotton fabric. 

Next, I popped my buttonhole foot onto my sewing machine and threaded it with heavy duty thread. I set the size of the buttonhole, positioned the waistband under the needle, and pushed the pedal. Fail! The reinforced denim waistband was too thick for my machine to scooch along under the needle. The fabric pretty much remained stationary and all I got was a mess of thread. So, went back to the drawing board. Or should I say that I went running to Google.

I searched how to hand sew a buttonhole. There are plenty of really good tutorials that showed me the way. So, I broke out the pearl cotton thread and a touch of Dritz Fray Check (I dabbed the cut edges of the buttonhole with the Dritz Fray Check to help prevent fraying…and recreating the original problem!).

It worked! My husband has put these jeans back into rotation, which is the whole point, right—to get at least one more wear out of them?