From Thrashed to Patched (OR: From Sloppy to Poppy?) ((it's a mending post))

Have you ever been putting on an item of clothing and heard it go RRRRRRRRRRIPPPPPPP like a freaking cartoon sound effect? That happened to me recently with my (I guess very old??) jean jacket. Fortunately, I am a sewer!! ...No, not the very important infrastructure that conveys sewage >:c I AM A BITCH WHAT SEWS! So (sew), I got right to work!

Heads up- I'm showin' hole in these next pictures:

I loooove this fabric. I only used a tiny piece of it many years ago for a mini embroidery project and I've been guarding the remnants until exactly the right project came along. And now it has! It would have been good enough for me to simply patch one side of the hole and call it good, but the jeans material is getting a bit threadbare (hence the original rip) and I really had a bee in my bonnet to make both sides of my jacket beautiful. So first I cut out a patch to match the shape of the torn panel, sewing it up along the still-sturdy jacket seams.

With that big old interior patch in place, I now had a good, solid base to sew a much more intricate design onto it.

Guys. I really like poppies. Like, I've got a whole story about what they mean to me- but this post is already mega long, so I'll share it another time. Anyway, I cut out a big cluster of poppies from the fabric, opting to keep the outline of the design's perimeter. I cut in notches along the edge, folded over each individual segment, and ironed them, so that the edge of the patch wouldn't fray over time. Sorry, I don't know how to explain it any better than that.

Then I stretched out that section of my jacket using an Embroidery Snap Frame (affiliate link) that a friend gifted me a while ago. It's super handy for working on a large, bulky area!

Remember that really bad description I gave earlier about how I notched and ironed over the patch's edges? Here, maybe this picture kinda shows what I meant? You can see how it's already fraying around the notch marks in that left photo. So yeah, then I sewed around the entire perimeter using a blanket stitch to secure every edge down tight onto the jacket.

See? See how different these two photos are??? You can see it, right??????

Tig helped.

And then it wassssss DONESIES!

Wh- What's that? You want a... fashion show? A fashion show at lunch? Well, if you insist!

I leave you with these final two pictures, with my jacket held up to the light so the original hole is slightly more illuminated than the rest of the jacket, thus giving you a better idea of just how much work those patches are doing: