Mending: Replace a Missing Hook and Eye

I hate it when a hook and eye comes out on a piece of clothing. I never seem to notice it until I’m trying to put it on and get out the door for church or something similar.

Luckily fixing a hook and eye is pretty simple and I always keep a bunch of spares on hand. They are very inexpensive, so pick up a few next time you are at the store! I’m actually considering adding several to shirts I have that have that annoying gaping button issue–but that is another blog post.

Here you can see a skirt of mine where the hook came off completely. Since there is nothing else holding the zipper closed at the top this is a problem–as I move the zipper keeps coming undone. So it was time to sew on a new one.

Here are my materials. Good all purpose thread (you really should have some in white and black in your sewing/mending kit), some hooks and eyes, needles, a seam ripper and scissors

First use the seam ripper and remove the leftover stitching from the previous hook and eye (obviously skip this step if you are adding a fastener to something that has never had one before).

Now I’m not a professional seamstress, so someone out there will probably shake their head at my unprofessional technique–but I’m just going to show you how I do this repair.

First I went ahead and threaded my needle and put a knot in it. The next thing I needed to do was figure out where to place the hook. I wasn’t sure that it was exactly the same size as the previous one so I didn’t just want to line it up with where the holes in the fabric were from the old stitching. Instead, since the “eye” or loop part was fine I simply put my new hook through it and then held the zipper together to see where it would fall on the other side.

I carefully held that down with one hand and prepared to sew. There just isn’t really a good way to pin this down. . .

Once I could see where it was placed I took a small stitch in the fabric without trying to go through the hook at all–just to anchor my thread (I’ve moved things aside in this picture so you can see).

Then I just started taking a few small stitches around the metal loops on the hook to secure it down.

I did about 4 or 5 stitches in each of the loops.

Then I took a small stitch just through the fabric and used that as the stitch to tie my knot off of–there is a video showing how to do that at the bottom of the post.