A few weeks ago, I noticed my shirt had gotten a couple small holes, right next to each other, probably snags from going through the dryer. This was especially a bother because it was a fairly new shirt — I’d only worn it a few times — so throwing it straight into the scrap bin would have been wasteful.
Instead, I took something else out of the scrap bin. Can you find it?
In the scrap bin, I found a piece of fabric with similar colors and pattern (navy/white geometric) to one band of the shirt’s print, and used lime green thread (not in the picture) to rough out a teardrop shape through the shirt and scrap, around the holes. After that I rough cut the scrap to the teardrop shape, around the first basting stitches, and folded the edges under, then basted the folded edges down.
After basting, I dug through my embroidery floss stash until thread turned up that matched two of the other colors. I used the light blue one to make three touching rows of running stitch around the edge, and the salmon pink one to make two stripes across the patch in the middle. All the embroidery stitches went through both the patch and the main shirt fabric, so they both made the repair a good visual match and contributed to firmly attaching the patch to the shirt.
Here’s a close up of how it turned out:
It’s definitely one of those visible, rather than invisible, repairs, but I still think it looks like it’s supposed to be that way. I’m keeping the same patch material handy in case the same thing happens again, or maybe to put similar appliques elsewhere on the shirt as a repeating motif.
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