Don’t pull your jeggings/skinny jeans on by the belt loop!

Ask me how I know.

I couldn’t even have told you that I do this.   I mean, I thought I was pulling them on by tugging at the waist.

But the unfortunate ripping sound told me otherwise. Ugh.

I fixed them, but the repair is fresh off the sewing machine, so I can’t vouch for the long-term effectiveness.

Time will tell, but I have great faith that it will hold.

At least, as long as I remember to pull my jeans up in the manner of a responsible person.

Luckily, I keep an old denim shirt in my scrap bag for denim repairs such as these.

I cut up a square, pinned it on the inside of the pants, and then did a whole bunch of zig-zag stitching to hold it in place.

(You can see the lighter denim peeking through there.)

So, I had a repaired surface now, but the belt loop was still hanging free.

The loop was WAY too thick for my sewing machine to get through, so I opted to hand-sew the loop back into place.

I didn’t even try to get the needle all the way through the loop; I just made sure to catch part of the underside of the loop with each stitch.

It was still a little tough to push the needle through, and I was glad I had a thimble on hand to help me!

If you look closely at the jeans, you can see that the bottom of the loop has stitching that shouldn’t be there.   But the rest of the repair is covered up very nicely by the belt loop.

The good news is that I never tuck in my shirts, and they’re always long enough to cover the waistband of my jeans.

So this repair is probably never going to even see the light of day, which means that those little stitches will go completely unnoticed.

I’m embarrassed to say that I did this to my black pair of Stitch Fix jeans too. I’m a slow learner!

(jeans from this October 2017 fix)

But since the Stitch Fix jeans are much better fabric than these, all that happened was the the belt loop popped loose; the fabric underneath was just fine.

So, all I had to do was reattach the belt loop, and I was good to go.

Happily, the design of these belt loops was way less lumpy than the cheap jeans, so I was actually able to top-stitch these with my machine after hand-sewing the loop on.

Moral of the story: Don’t be like me! Pull your jeans up by the waistband, not the loops, because even expensive belt loops are not meant to withstand that kind of force.