The clothes used in this tutorial had been sitting on my ‘to do’ shelf with rips in them for well over a year. It was time to fix them and make a tutorial while I was at it. I hope you find this tutorial for how to mend rips in clothes useful! Now I have more clothes to wear, rip free!

What You’ll Need to Mend Rips in Your Clothes

Materials

• Clothing to be mended
• Matching thread colour
• Lightweight fusible interfacing                   
• Scrap piece of fabric     

Tools

• Sewing machine
• Sewing machine needle (Universal 80/12 or 90/14 will be fine)
• General scissors
• Iron
• Ironing board

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How to Mend Rips in Clothes Step by Step

or watch it here on YouTube
Step 1

Press the garment with an iron to help the rip lay flat (especially if you are fixing a fleecy jumper like mine and it has started to roll).

Snip off any stray threads from the ripped area.

Step 2

Turn the garment inside out and press with the iron again to help the rip come together as much as possible and stay flat.

Step 3

Cut a small piece of the lightweight fusible interfacing so it’s big enough to cover the ripped area. Ensure the fusible side is facing down! I’ve made this mistake before a few times…

Step 4

Place a piece of scrap fabric over the interfacing (to protect the iron just in case) and press with the iron. This with adhere the interfacing to the garment and help hold the ripped sides together.

Step 5

Find the dashed zigzag stitch on your sewing machine. If you don’t have one of these a normal zig zag stitch should work fine.

I also adjust my stitch length to a 2-2.5 as well. You might like to go a bit bigger.

Ensure the sewing machine is set up with a matching thread colour. Or you could use a different colour to get a more decorative effect!

Step 6

Starting at the top of the rip start sewing using the dashed zigzag stitch and work all the way down the rip then reverse and go all the way back up. On your way back down, move the needle over to one side slightly. Keep repeating this forwards and backwards motion until your ripped sides have been joined back together with the dashed zigzag stitch. Theres a dashed zigzag stitch going on there….you’ll just have to trust me or watch the video ?

Step 7

Once you are done your rip will be hardly noticeable! I could have sewn this one a bit more on each side, but it’s not too bad!

And you’re done!

Check out these before and afters….

I hope you found this tutorial useful!

Happy sewing everyone!

Domenica ?