Monster face knee patch

My son actually wore a hole through the knee of his jeans.  Up till this point he always out grew his clothes long before he wore them out.

Both my children have embarrassingly large clothes collections but many of Walters are "handsome clothes" as he calls them; church, pageant and formal wear attire.  He actually doesn't have that many pairs of jeans.  And since jeans are day to day attire they are not something he can go with out.

So instead of buying new (ha!) or even heading down to the second hand store to replace his jeans, I figured it would be a good investment of my time to repair them instead.

As a kid my mom tried a few times to repair our jeans.  She bought the iron on denim type patches, and ironed them onto the knees right over the worn spot. Perfect- right? No. Although industrious and, from a mothers perspective, entirely functional, these were not things 12 year old me was looking for in clothes.  So although mom had "fixed" the problem with the jeans she soon saw that it was a waste of her precious time since we never wore the ugly patched pants again.

I wanted to avoid the same mistake with Walter, but new jeans were not an option.   Enter the monster face knee patch.  This might not be an ideal solution for a picky teen aged girl, but for my monster loving four year old its perfect!

And fortunately for me this fix comes easy and cheap- by cheap I mean free.

First, take the jeans with the worn out knee and cut around the hold, removing all the "stringy bits" (I'm pretty sure that's the professional sewing lingo).

Jeans with hole in the knee

"stringy bits" gone

Next cut a piece of craft felt a little larger than the newly created hole. I used red because it made sense to me as the interior of the mouth, but since this is a "monster" you really could use any colour under the sun.  Using a thread colour close to that of your pants hand stitch the felt to the inside of the jeans.  I did two rows of stitches because, well, obviously Walter is not gentle on his clothes.

Two rows of stitches

Then I cut out teeth, eyes and a tongue from felt.  The tongue I certainly could have done without, but Walter was insistent that they look like *this* (followed me around the house with his tongue hanging out of his mouth).  And since I want to be sure the jeans will be worn again I gave in.

Using my hot glue gun (don't judge me, it was a lazy sort of day) I glued everything down.

Monster face patch

Then I showed the pants to Walter.  He promptly, in our living room, stripped down to his underpants to try them out. I suppose that makes the monster patch a success!