Using Ribbon as Patch in Clothing Repair

Series Summary

Everyone gets holes in their clothes. You may not notice holes in your co-worker's clothes, but that's because they have been diligent about their wardrobe. Other people just never get around to repairing their holes. In some circles, this sort of lax behavior passes for a fashion statement. But for those of us with nine-to-five jobs, this oversight counts for negligence and could indicate greater personality problems for the person wearing said clothes. Or this could just mean that they have not had time to patch that hole, or perhaps they simply don't know how. Why take the chance that people will think less of you when Expert Village makes this chore so fun and easy?

In this series of free clothing repair videos, our sewing crafts expert demonstrates in detail how to patch a hole in your clothing with ribbon, fabric patches and even applique patches. Not only will you cover up that hole, you will make your outfit more exciting than it was before with these great fashion tips from our expert.

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Karen for Expert Village and today I am going to show you how to prepare holes and stains with all kinds of patches. I will be showing you how to use ribbons as patches, how to use buttons to repair small holes, how to make your own appliqué patches, how to apply a store bought patch, how to repair a pair of dress pants with a piece of fabric from the dress pants and how to make reinforcement patch to repair a collar button. Now I'm going to show you how to make a repair with a ribbon as a patch. Sometimes you have a stain or a tear that is in a place that just doesn't work with a patch, so it is nice to use a ribbon and then you can extend the area that is being patched. Now, I've chosen this pink ribbon because it matches with the garment and as you can see, we are going to place a ribbon here. It will compliment the design of the garment and then I am going to cut this here and if we also put it on the opposite side, now it looks like it was originally made like that. Let me show you now how to apply this ribbon to our shirt so that you can sew it on. First we want to measure how far from the stain and we want to have that even all the way up. So we want to place the ribbon in a straight line so we will measure from the stain. It's 2 1/4 inches and we will just measure that same measurement all the way up, marking as we go. Now on the other side, let's measure where it is from this seam because that is the design element on the shirt, these two seams. We want the distance to be the same. So our line is going to be about 1 1/4 inches from here and mark that. Okay and then you just want to test it out and take a look and make sure that it is going to look nice and even. Okay that looks good. "