Fun Fish Patched Jeans

I’m always happy to find projects that allow me to use my sewing and creative skills in new ways.  Some time ago, I noticed a friend’s jeans – they were old, softened and well worn.  He’d already put a couple of patches on them with his sewing machine (I know – a man who owns a sewing machine, awesome!).  I offered to make him a patch to cover a slit in the knee.  This picture shows the patch I made (the fish) and his patch (the red square).

Up close you could that the pants still needed a lot of love.  Really, they were so worn that a lot of the fabric needed to be shored up.  Thus began a minor labour of love.  I quickly realized that I wouldn’t be able to access many of the areas with the legs intact, so I split the jeans down each outside seam.

I wanted to somehow blend my fish patch and his red square patch, since red squares and fish don’t usually coexist!  You can see in the next photo how I did a mock up of what I wanted to do.  I went online to find different types of fish to use.  At least one was inspired by a photo from National Geographic.

To make the patches I used an unbleached cotton as a base and sewed coloured fabrics onto it with a zig zag stitch.  For a couple I also did some hand embroidery.  Here’s the beginnings of the flying fish patch.  You can see the pencil outlines of the other patches.

Here is one of the fish where I did some hand embroidery for the eyes and the gills.

I made up some squares in red to match the original red square.  Here I’ve tacked them onto the jeans before I sew them on using my machine.

Here is the finished look of the front of the pants.  Under some of the areas I also sewed in a reinforcing layer of jean harvested from another soft old pair of jeans he gave me.  I didn’t want to go to all this work only to have the thighs rip open.

Having done all that work I decided that the back needed some attention even though the fabric wasn’t very worn out there.  I was at a loss about what to do fish-wise when I came up with the idea of a school of fish crossing across both legs.  Here is what it looked like before I sewed down my school.  You can see the split side seams.

This is a close up of the little fish.  I used some leftover slinky silver fabric and sewed it on with rainbow metallic thread.  [Side note: I think I was a bird in my past life and I love sparkles, so my sister bought me this spool of metallic thread even though I wasn’t sure what I’d ever use it for.]

Here is the back once it was completed. 

My friend has worn these jeans.  It takes a strong man to wear jeans covered in fish patches, but he’s got the personality to pull it off.  Unfortunately he’s a bit concerned to wear the pants in case they get damaged.  I guess he’ll just have to treat them like the work of art they are.