My parents hate torn jeans.  When I was in high school, it was the heyday of grunge fashion and torn jeans were cool. You could, with torn jeans, pretend like you didn’t live in one of the more affluent neighborhoods of Fremont.  More likely, you paid good money for jeans that were already pre-torn in delicately artful ways.

My parents just thought torn jeans looked like you were poor. Of course, my parents’ disapproval only made me desperately wanted to wear them.  I never quite made it out of the house with torn jeans, and they ended up just getting tossed.

Now of course, I have a 6 year old boy, and 6 year old boys cannot seemingly live in the same universe with an intact pair of jeans. I swear, as soon as we get a pair of jeans it seems that they have holes. I have to say, I don’t particularly care if my kid wears torn jeans, but winters here are cold and it just doesn’t work to have jeans with holes. We also get a bunch of hand me down jeans that were previously worn by a 6 year old boy and thus suffer from the same problem. The thought of forking over $12-15 (at a minimum) each for 8 pairs of jeans was more than I could bear.

So I figured I’d patch them, but add a little flair, too. Mind you, this takes some dedication. I HATE sewing. Mostly because I’m incredibly bad at it, and I don’t like to be bad at things. I got some of those iron-on patches, thread in a few colors, and a few fabric scraps.  Incidentally, it’s not that easy finding masculine fabrics–there’s lots of pink and ladybugs and purple chickens and tulips but not too may boy-friendly fabrics.

They turned out pretty nice!

The felt patch on the right hand one is already a bit frayed–I’m sure there’s some smart way to deal with that fabric that I’m unaware of. My favorite, though is the green car fabric that I found:

I wonder how long it will take for him to wear his way through these. I’m hoping it’s more than a week or two.