Sunflower patch

With summer hopefully inching it's way here I'm really glad I found these trousers again and finally got around to patching them.  I've been wondering whether to darn or patch and what kind of pattern to go for since last year!

These are some well worn linen trousers that I've had for a few years now.  They're great for summer because they're nice and airy while still covering me up (I burn like a very burnable thing).  Unfortunately the light material means that the hard wear I've put them through was a bit much. I have a coat that I made last year for the summer with embroidered flowers on it and I thought I could do similar flowers when darning these trousers.

These are the cuffs, there are also great big red flowers in the same style on the coat tails.

The thin linen of these trousers thought makes darning them a little more complicated as it may well just make a series of smaller holes around the problem area as the threads of the embroidery are stronger and may pull the fabric apart during wear.  Also, although I love the way these flowers turned out on the white of my coat, they didn't seem quite right for the beige of the trousers.

A quick ferret through my stash and I found some gold polyester taffeta (side note: I love that I now have the kind of fabric stash where I can randomly find gold taffeta :)) that looked just right for a slightly jazzy sunflower.

A quick sketch and some brown cashmere blend later...

Raw materials

I use Frixion pens to mark my fabric wherever possible - they don't rub off like chalk, but disappear under an iron or steam.

Ready for sewing

The white material here is sew-in interfacing.  I put that on the inside of the hole and then sewed the patch on the outside through all the layers for extra strength and stability.  I decided to hand whipstitch the sunflower on, but now that I've worn them a couple of times I'm actually going to try going back over with a tiny machine stitch.  I did it be hand originally because of all the tight corners, but I did my stitches a bit too tiny and they're starting to come away a little. 

Done!

A pretty (and very shiny) patch!