How to Patch a Hole in Your Child’s Pants in 31 Easy Steps

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How to patch a hole in your child’s pants in 31 easy steps.*

1. Pull out your child’s last clean pair of pants. Discover they have a large hole in them.
2. Curse yourself for ignoring laundry in favor of last night’s Netflix binge.
3. Dig through your child’s hamper to find the least dirty pair of dirty pants.
4. Dress your child. Tell yourself that no one else will notice the smell.
5. If you’re lucky, drop your child off at daycare/preschool/school before completing the next 25 steps. (If you’re not lucky, then enjoy the preview of tonight’s post-bedtime activities. And maybe skip steps 11, 13, and 19.)
6. Stare blankly at the pants and try to remember if you went over pants repair in eighth grade home ec. When you draw a blank, google instructions for patching pants.
7. Discover there is such a thing as an iron-on patch! Yay! Continue reading and learn you should still sew on the iron-on patch. Wonder what idiot invented this completely misleading product.
8. Realize you’re going to need tools. Remember you registered for a sewing machine when you got married. Search the house for the sewing machine.
9. Find the sewing machine buried under a box of very fragile Christmas ornaments you haven’t used since you had kids. Realize you haven’t come across scissors, needles, thread, or that fusible stuff Google said you needed.
10. Mentally prepare yourself to go to the fabric store.
11. Stop at Starbucks on the way to the store. This adventure calls for caffeine, which you will take in chilled form so you can get a Trenta.
12. Arrive at the fabric store. Utilize the store’s helpful staff to quickly locate scissors, needles, and the fusible stuff. Spend an hour trying to find the exact, correctly faded shade of fabric you need to match the hole in the six-month-old, washed-on-the-regular pants—from memory, natch, because you left the pants at home in a ball on the floor of your kid’s room where you threw them in despair this morning. Give up. Pick a fabric color that is vaguely related to the color of the pants, get matching thread, and check out.
13. Stop at Starbucks on the way home because you need another Trenta.
14. Spend some (a lot of) time trying to make sense of the sewing machine’s instruction book. Then spend another hour making a bobbin and threading the machine.
15. Prepare the pants for the patch. This will take more or less time depending on whether your family is an ironing family or not.
16. Use the fusible stuff to attach the patch. Wonder why you should bother sewing it on, as this iron-on glue seems to be working pretty well. Turn the pants right-side out so you can call it done and watch as the patch peels off.
17. Iron the patch back on and head to the sewing machine.
18. Realize that you can’t reach the hole with the sewing machine and you’re going to have to rip open the seam of the pants leg, per Google, to reach the hole. Discover you don’t have a seam ripper. Go back to the fabric store to buy one.
19. Stop at Starbucks again. You’ve earned it.
20. Start sewing the patch on. Notice that the needle on the sewing machine is moving up and down, but not actually sewing anything. Pretend to troubleshoot while having no real idea what you’re doing.
21. Think about calling your mother, but not too hard, because then you’ll have to admit she was right and you should have listened when she tried to teach you basic sewing skills.
22. Remember you bought needles and decide to attach the patch by hand, because how hard can it be.
23. Learn that it can be very hard to push the needle through two thick pieces of fabric and the now hardened iron-on fusible glue stuff. And the task is not made easier by the eleven-and-a-half cups of caffeine so kindly provided by Starbucks.
24. Hold up the pants to view your very large and rather crooked stitching on the patch. Notice the large hole you had to open on the seam. Wonder why you made a big hole in a pair of pants you were trying to fix. Realize you need the non-sewing sewing machine to sew the hole up.
25. Curse the heavens and toss the pants into your recycling bag.
26. Remember that there are stores. Stores which sell things like NEW PANTS. Wonder why it took you till this point to remember that.
27. Start shopping. Fall down internet shopping rabbit hole. Place items—yes items—in cart. Begin checkout process and realize that pants won’t arrive for 7-10 business days, unless you’d like to pay $50 in expedited shipping. Which still won’t get them to you by tomorrow morning, when you will need pants.
28. Look at the clock and realize that there’s no way you can do laundry and still sleep tonight.
29. Begin picking through the kid’s hamper for the second least dirty pair of pants.
30. Think about starting a #EveryoneWearsDresses movement. Because if everyone wore dresses, no one would tear holes in the knees of their pants. Just their knees. Which is fine, because you can just slap a Band-Aid on that sucker and move on.
31. Tell yourself you’ve earned some Netflix time and that you’ll just watch one short episode before you go to bed…

*Oh. I’m sorry; were you actually looking for instructions? Um. I don’t sew, but my husband says this is a really good tutorial. Personally, I like this list of tutorials because they’re more fun.