I was the last kid in my high school to get bell bottoms because my mom, thinking that the “fad would never last,” refused to buy something that she was sure I wouldn’t wear for more than a month.

When she finally relented and let me get a pair, they were too short and definitely not Levis. It ruined me for life. Once I got a job and my driver’s license, I bought my own jeans: long and Levi’s. To this day, my jeans have to be dragging-the-ground long and yes, they’ve got to be Levis.

I present to you Exhibit A, from my high school yearbook …

and Exhibit B, from last week …

So yeah, some things never change. Fortunately, my mending skills have improved somewhat (along with my taste in shoes and socks). For instance, I did try stitching a pair of jeans a few years back …

But this time I wanted to try a patchplay solution. So I sacrificed a much-loved-but-no-longer-worn denim dress, first cutting off pieces of the hem …

and then attaching them to the trimmed back edges of my jeans. This patch was attached with Jude Hill’s glue stitch (seen here on the “other side”) …

and this one was attached with running stitch (also a b-side view) …

I bound the raw edges on the inside with blanket stitch, but for the outside I used Jude Hill’s wrap stitch and two strands of Deb Lacativa’s magic thread …

To good effect methinks …

Now I just need to tackle the Levis that I bought at a Wimberley thrift store for two-bucks-a-pop and wore to shreds …

It’s a good thing that old dress has a lot of bound edges!