On the Mend: Dog Damage

I love dogs, but I have had my fair share of crafting casualties due to pups. This, however, was a new one.

This is Poppy, the most recent addition to my friend’s family. She is so sweet and as energetic as any puppy can be. Behind this angel face, though, is the heart of a cold-blooded chew-toy killer. I’ve never seen a dog so capable of making ribbon with their teeth. Sad to say, instead of a chew toy, she got a hold of a beloved baseball cap.

I knew this fix was going to take some work and would never look like it did fresh out of the store. That didn’t mean I wasn’t up to the task, though.

I used heavy-duty thread (that I found at ScrapsKC!), a monster-sized sharp needle, and a black denim patch. The essential plan was to satin stitch in the frayed fabric, cleaning up the holes while reinforcing the fabric. My hope was to leave as much of the original fabric as possible, but some place were too large and too far gone for me to stitch over.

Similar to my decorative satin stitch, I divided it into sections with single stitches that gave me guidelines when I started to fill it all in. It took a long time, and the satin stitch couldn’t be as full in some places as I would’ve liked. Look how it turned out, though!

Does it look like a brand new baseball cap? It does not. Does it look like a well-loved cap you can definitely wear out of the house? I say yes! If it were my baseball cap, I would’ve gone with a blue thread, I think. This is way more discrete, though, and I can understand wanting that, too.

Depending on the extremity of the dog chewing (and again, it’s hard for me to imagine a dog doing a better job at this than Poppy), this process could be used on any damaged fabric. Just make sure to have coordinating patches and thread!