 Alright so sewing 101, mending a hole. Alright so what does a tank top with a hole in it right here have to do with a pair of lace thong underwear. Get your mind out of the gutter. So this is an inexpensive pair of lace thong underwear from Walmart. I bought it specifically for doing this repair. I don't wear thong underwear, not that you need to know that. Alright this is a tank top I bought when I was in Las Vegas with my girlfriends and we were doing our art retreat and I love this tank top. I wear it all the time and if you live in Las Vegas or you're going there for a visit and you go to Walgreens which is where I bought this shirt and you see these tank tops. I would love to have somebody send me another one in. I just cut the label out and threw it away. Hold on. Extra large. I'd love two of them. They're not expensive but I do love it. Anyway if you live in or you're visiting Las Vegas and you have a chance to go to Walgreens on the Las Vegas Strip, that's the best place to buy souvenir FYI and when I was there they had these and I would love to have one or two more because I do love this shirt. It's not you know it's just thin knit material. So anyway when I came back from Alaska and yes I took it with me to Alaska I had a hole in it. The laundry people on the board ship had a hole in it anyway. So we're going to fix it. The first thing we've got to do is change the thread in our machine because I was just making journal covers because I'm filming this the same day I filmed that and I've got white thread in here. That won't work on this black tank top. So first thing we're going to do is change our thread. So I just pulled the top thread out and here's some black thread. Pull these labels off because sometimes you can just poke it on with the label on there and sometimes it's just a bigger pain than it needs to be. That's easier to just take them off. We're mixed media artists. Don't throw the labels away. I'm saving. I must just stuck them to my shelf. You know they'll show up in a journal cover somewhere. My thread holder has this piece that holds the thread spool on so I'm going to stick that on the front. Before I thread the machine I'm going to see if I have a black bobbin. I do. Yay. That means I don't have to wind one. So I can just thread my machine. There's a catch there. A catch here. You can go down and around. Gotta bring this little arm. Oh you can't see. Oops. There we go. Let's do that again. Alright. So I've got my thread spool in. I'm going to put that there's a catch here. There's another one here. I'll bring the thread down and around. I moved the wheel here until this the needle moves and this little arm comes up and it goes in there. It goes down here. There's a catch. There's a catch on the needle and then it goes through the needle. Every machine's a little bit different so look in your machine's instruction book for how your machine should be threaded. You should never have it too far from you so you can remind yourself how to do stuff with your machine. I still have to remind myself. Alright so I'm going to pull this bobbin out. I'm going to put this one in. Now it should wind clockwise, which it is, for my machine. Again everyone's different but I think most of them are like that. Put the needle down and pull it up again and then I'm going to pull in this upper thread and that as I'm doing that it's going to bring a loop of bobbin thread up and I'm going to pull that bobbin thread out so now both of my threads are up to the top of the machine. That's what you want. I did all that but I need to change the needle because I have a big thick denim needle in here and this fabric is all pretty thin so I have a smaller size 11 needle here that I'm going to pull out and I'm going to take this needle out. There's a little screw here so I'm going to take the needle out. I'm not going to go too far with it because I'll probably just put it back when I'm done. I don't use these small needles too much. I insert the new needle. There's usually a certain way the needles have to go in, a certain way that the hole has to face, so again look at your owner's manual and I'm going to tighten up the screw after I get it in there. For mine the hole should be going front to back. Alrighty, we've got it done. Yay! Alright so now we are going to cut a piece of lace off this underwear. Now of course you can buy stretch lace at the fabric store but sometimes it can be a little hard to find so I thought it was just easier to buy a piece of cheap underwear and honestly and get the stretch lace that way. The first thing I'm going to have to do is take the label off. I'm not going to toss the rest of the underwear because it might come in handy for fixing something else so maybe you have a piece of clothing that you could use for this type of repair, another t-shirt maybe if you have something like this you need to fix. So I'm just kind of disassembling the underwear. Brand new, never worn. I'm actually thinking that part of the crotch of the underwear might work. Okay cut it off here. This is the whole crotch of the underwear. Now the first thing I'm going to do is cut away the black cotton that they have on the inside here because I just want the lace. I should really get my sewing scissors out for this. I do have them. So these are actually surgical scissors. Oh here we go, surgical scissors. I use for sewing and embroidery needlework. These are actually Ginger black sewing shears. I've had more than 20 years. I've had them and I don't think they've ever needed to be sharpened. Application scissors are funny-looking scissors. They're made to cut away things like this without cutting the wrong fabric. So they're made to hold the fabrics apart while you're cutting and they do a fabulous job. These are much much sharper than the scissors I use every day on paper and stuff like that. Don't use your fabric scissors on paper. They'll dull them. Okay so this is trash. So now we have this little piece of lace. I'm going to line it up. Can you see what I'm doing? No you can't see. There we go. So I'm going to line the piece of lace up here with the back of the shirt. So if I'm going to do, there's a lot of different ways you could do the repair you know by pinching it and sewing it together but I thought why not just add an extra piece of fabric there and it may not look like it was always that way but it will look more interesting and honestly it's going to be under my hair so who really cares. Now my only thought is do I want to put this all the way down? Do I want to just do it low? So I think I'm going to cut up one side of the lace and I'm cutting the edge off. So now I have the edge is free, the decorative edge and then I'm going to trim this off and if I do this right I can make it look like an applique. So I'm going to wrap this piece of the side around until it meets this other scallop on the other side and I'm going to pin it together. Pulls myself with the pins. So when I sew it together I can make it look like an applique. Alright so let's get it sewn down. Now when you're sewing stretch fabrics you either want to use a serger or you want to use a zigzag stitch. So in this case we're going to use a zigzag stitch and I am going to order that little piece of fabric. Go see I'm going to test it on this other piece of lace that I had and you know what I had that black knit. That'll give me an approximation of what we're going to be working with on the t-shirt. We're going to test our stitching and our stitch length and our zigzag. So I'm going to do about a two so it'll be little and I'm going to lower the stitch length to like just under three. The width is two and that needle is working well. Let's see. It's a little bit long. Let's do it. I would like it closer together. This is why you do a test. I need my reading glasses. Black on black is really hard to see. I'm just testing and testing until I get it right. Yeah that's better. Okay so now that I got it where I want it I'm going to cut this. This is our test piece so you can see all the different lines of stitching. Maybe you can. It is black on black but I've got it where I want it. So now I'm going to take my tank top and the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to cut out the old labels or take off the old labels because they're just going to be in my way. They're going to show through. I don't want them on there so we're going to take them off. I could seam rip them. I'm not going to. I'm just going to cut the bulk of them off. So I'm going to start at the upper edge and I'm going to zigzag all around this piece of lace I've added. Now the trick to this is don't pull on the fabric. You want it to go through the machine as flat as possible. You still want to stop in the corner with your needle down and turn pulling the pins out as we go. We don't want to sew over the pins. We're going around a curve so I'm going slow and I'm holding my fabric and I'm taking my time and forth at the beginning where I met the beginning. I'm going to trim all my threads. Frequently when you're doing something like this you might get it on there and you have to go back and you have to add some more stitches somewhere so if we have to do that I won't be surprised. Like I said this is my favorite shirt so I'm going to do what I need to. So that's pretty good. Let's see how this is sticking up. I want that to be down so I'm going to add a second row of stitching to hold that down. I'm going to start over here on the other side this time. All my threads off. That's pretty good. Make sure it's all on there good and I didn't miss anything. Doesn't look like I did. So now what I want to do is I'm going to go to the back side where the hole is and I'm going to stick my applique scissors in the hole and I'm going to cut the knit fabric out around the inside of the extra fabric I just added carefully without cutting the lease. This is an optional step. You don't have to do this. This part's a little more advanced than just adding a patch of fabric but adding a patch of fabric is a great way to practice your zigzag stitches and you can do it in a square if you're nervous about trying to do a curve. Do a square. Squares are easier. So now we have that. So now my tank top is fixed. There's no hole. I've got this cute piece of lace in the back. There we go. I'd still like another one. So if any of you are nearer in Las Vegas, I'll pay you back. Alright, so it's a quick and easy patch out of fabric that was definitely non-traditional because I used a pair of underwear, new underwear, not used underwear. But when you have to patch any of your clothing no matter what it is look and see what you have maybe in your donation pile that you can use that you can cut up to make your patch with. Think outside the box and look around and see what you've got. That's it for today. Have fun practicing your sewing and your zigzag stitches and don't be afraid to practice your machine and have some fun with it. Yeah? Alright, go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye.