I'm grabbing every favourite piece of clothing I have around the house and mending it with a needle and thread
I'm not very good at it, but it's not terribly hard to close up broken seams good enough for some use. It sure as heck beats buying a new pair of jeans for $70 just because I somehow destroy the crotch every year
I'm finding this to be really satisfying and relatively easy to do. Certainly I can develop better stitching technique and use better tools and material, but it's easy enough to be good enough, or so it seems to me now
Yessss! Just got a sewing machine and finished my first bag (it took me like two months on and off) and I'm never going to toss torn clothing again.
I ordered this cool graphic t-shirt and it was way too big, so I complained to the retailer and they sent a smaller one and told me to keep it. So I took a stab at taking it in, and, well, it went terribly (I need a walking foot for stretchy fabrics), but it still worked out and it's totally wearable.
Once you start to realize that it's not that hard to mend things... It's like a super power.
I have a couple of really nice REI camp chairs and one of them got several holes burned through it by flying embers around the fire one night, so I patched them. I didn't even try to make it match, I full-on chose a totally different color patch, and bright red heavy duty thread, and it looks badass.
I find that walking feet can be hit or miss. Sometimes it's a matter of adjusting the zig zag stitch a bit or making sure you have a ball point knit needle in your machine to get the stitches right. Adjusting the pressure of the foot can help sometimes too. Luckily walking feet aren't too expensive and they are fun to play with.
I eventually broke down and got a serger to make my own tshirts.
I'm really new at this so I don't pretend to actually know, but the problem I was having was massive bunching of the fabric that would make it basically either stop or turn, and because it was close to the edge I couldn't pull it through from both sides. Does that sound like something a walking foot will help me with?
It might. Sometimes with knits, especially if you have the wrong needle or are really close to the edge, it can catch in the feed dogs and cause that problem. You can have similar issues if you have too much tension as well. Make sure to get an old Tshirt with similar fabric that you are retiring and practice some different zig zag stitches first. I keep sacrificial clothing around for practice stitches. You can also try adjusting the foot pressure to get it to feed more consistently.