How To Mend & Repair Holes With Embroidery on Your Clothes

Embroidery is a great way to personalize your clothes, but it can also mend and repair some holes. Check out this video tutorial to see how to do it.

Hey y’all, today I’m going to show you how to repair holes with embroidery. This is a decorative way to fix holes in your clothes. I made the dress below from my Catalina pattern and added embroidery to the bodice. For the fabric I used a thrifted dress.

However sustainable that choice was to remake a thrifted dress, it may not have been a wise one. Unfortunately, little frayed holes have started to appear all over my dress, and I can only blame the fabric. The tag says it’s 100% rayon, but I’ve never had rayon behave like this. It makes me wonder what kind of washing chemicals the original dress might have been exposed to to make it wear like this.

They’re almost like moth holes, but not quite as clean and as far as I know moths don’t eat rayon. And if they were the cause I would expect a lot more of my clothes to have similar holes because I have a lot of rayon challis in my wardrobe.

Because I spent so much time embroidering the top and I really like the fit of this dress, I didn’t want to just turn it into rags like I do with other clothes I don’t want to repair. So I decided to start adding small bits of embroidery to cover the holes as they appear. Essentially this is a thread patch covering the hole. Much like this pair of mended jeans, I hope the small embroidered additions add character to this dress over time.

Supplies Needed to Embroider Over a Hole or Stain

This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. All affiliate links are identified with (affiliate link) after the link or a commissions earned statement above the link(s).

Here are the DIY supplies (affiliate links) I used to fix the holes in my dress; I also used a washable marker (not pictured) to draw my design:

• Embroidery floss (thread)
• Embroidery needle
• Lightweight fusible interfacing
• 3 inch embroidery hoop
• Embroidery scissors

I didn’t use a sewing machine at all for this project. If you’d like to see about using an embroidery machine on your garments, check out this post to see on one in action.

How to Repair a Hole with Embroidery

Here’s a short video showing how I repaired this hole, which you can also watch on YouTube here.

If you need more guidance on how to sew hand embroidery stitches, check out this post. I have a more detailed video as well as close up still photos in that post.

More Mending Ideas

Here are some more ideas to help you get through your mending pile or using visible stitching to add character to clothing repairs. One post helps you find motivation to mend (which is always my issue) and the other has visible mending techniques.