I find that the most cost-effective clothes are usually those that you won’t find at Wal-Mart or K-Mart nor at, for example, Sack’s Off Fifth. $50 dollar Levi’s, $100 Nike running shoes, $10 tee shirts, etc seem to last way longer than the cheapest stuff and the expensive stuff. That said, I recently started learning to sew, and am starting to believe that, for example, a $10 sweatshirt from CVS plus some sewing is much more cost effective than, say, the $50 Adidas option.

Do you have recommended improvements/modifications? Sounds like fun.

I wish, but I still have no idea what I’m doing, so not really. All I’ve repaired so far is a couple pairs of Levi’s that I keep tearing on my desks at school.

I mentioned sweaters from CVS because I bought one for ~$9 and the seams are coming apart after about 8 months, but it seems like it will be easy to fix because it was made in such a simple way.

Just to save you some trouble, if it comes apart on the seams because of age and not because of shoddy sewing from the maker, it's not worth fixing - it will come apart again at a different place within the next month or so. This is especially true for jeans. At least this is my decade-long experience with fixing everything.

Thanks! That's sorta what the woman said at the shop I bought my needle/thread. The sweater is definitely just poor sewing from whatever factory it came from, the jeans a combination.

Given that you have some experience, do you have any resources you can recommend? Maybe a good book with a bunch of the fundamental skills?

Ah, no, I'm sorry. I basically never learned how to do it apart from looking at a few pictures over 15 years ago and talking about it a little (experiences of when to use a patch and when just thread is fine for example). A friend of mine taught me how to use a machine but I find that for repairs it's far better to do things by hand. Most of the things are really easy to figure out with common sense. I bet youtube can help you though. I for myself would rather put my energy into learning how to work with new material, I'm often annoyed by how often old fabric does not hold up and I'm mostly repairing old stuff anyway where a repair does not need to be pretty or long-lived.

Well, if you make any posts on the things you try, I'd be interested in reading. Good luck!

I bought a pair of Frye boots -- ostensibly hand-made and durable, $360 dollar shoes -- which completely disintegrated after a year of walking around New York city and were not actually repairable. My cheapo $60 mall boots, on the other hand, got me through 3 years.