Ideas for salvaging a badly torn cycling jersey

Posted on by

I’ve got a question for you folks today, so put your problem-solving hats on.

A few weeks back I got an email from Tyler, which I’m reposting here with his permission:

I have a lightweight wool cycling jersey that I wore about two times before I crashed last year and tore up the right shoulder, part of the back, and some of the lower right side. I just thought I’d ask if you have any creative ideas for repairing or repurposing it. Parts of it are pretty well shredded, so I think a repair would be somewhat extensive (as in trimming off the entire right side and rebuilding with new shoulder and sleeve.) If you think you might have time to offer some suggestions I can take a few photos to give an idea of what it looks like. I’d hate to throw it away because it’s still 90% brand new wool.

He sent some photos:

Torn wool cycling jersey

Torn wool cycling jersey - back

Bad crash, right? He says he’s OK, but that doesn’t look like it could have been fun at all.

I had some ideas, but I wanted to throw it out for you folks, too. Any thoughts?

Here’s what I told him:

I was thinking that one thing you might do is find some fusible knit interfacing (you should be able to find it at a fabric store, if not you can definitely find it online) and iron it on the inside of the shoulder to help stabilize the torn area.

You could then maybe sew a patch of a contrasting color (in the same weight knit fabric) so that it looks like a design feature–you know, like a shoulder shield or some such, following the cool seam detail.

If you wanted to get funky, you could cut out a patch in the shape of a lizard/dragon so that the main part of its body covered the big hole, the tail curled over the smaller holes down the back, and its head and front arms are coming over the front. That could actually be pretty cool.

Does any of that help? There’s probably enough fabric there to make arm warmers if you weren’t able to fix the holes in the shoulder. That would be pretty simple to do by just tracing a pair….

What do you folks think? Any other ideas?

You might also like:

Zemanta

2 thoughts on “Ideas for salvaging a badly torn cycling jersey”

  1. I like your ideas of making a patch into a design feature. I immediately thought of stitching on a cool shoulder patch in a contrasting knit or woven fabric, like an old hunting or army sweater. The smaller holes could also just be zig-zag stitched together with matching thread.

    Reply