Avertissement IA

Every image and every sequence produced by this service is generated by a model from the photographs you supply. They show an illustration of how a repair approach could look, not a record of anything that has happened.

Each one carries the notice Illustration — your result will differ composited into the picture itself, not laid over it by a stylesheet. It travels with the file if you save it or send it to someone, and it is present on every plan. It cannot be turned off.

No assurance is given, expressly or by implication, that following what is shown will produce the result previewed. The actual result depends on your skill, the thread and materials you use, and the true condition of the fibres. This service knows none of those things.

• The true condition of the fibres. A photograph shows the hole, not how brittle the yarn is a centimetre away from it.
• How far the wear extends. Thinning that has not opened yet looks identical to sound cloth on a screen.
• What the cloth is actually made of. Blends photograph like the fibre they imitate.
• How the garment has been washed and dried, which decides how the repair will move afterwards.
• Your hand. Two people working the same method on the same cloth do not get the same result.

This list is shown beside every reading rather than kept on this page alone, because a limitation a user has to go looking for is a limitation that has been hidden.

Patching and Visible mending cannot be undone cleanly. Where an approach is irreversible it is marked as such beside the approach itself, on every screen where it appears, by a shape and a word rather than by a colour, at the same size as the description of the result.

• Darning — reversible. The darn is only thread. It can be picked out with a blunt needle and the garment returns to the state it is in now, hole included.
• Stitched reinforcement — reversible. Unpicking is tedious but complete. What remains afterwards are the needle holes, which usually close up after a wash.
• Patching — not reversible. A stitched patch can be unpicked, but the cloth beneath keeps the needle line and often a shadow where the patch sat. An iron-on or glued patch cannot be removed cleanly at all: the adhesive stays in the fibres.
• Visible mending — not reversible. Technically the thread comes out. In practice the contrasting thread has usually marked the cloth around it and the surrounding fibres have been worked, so the garment does not return to how it looks now. Treat this as a decision you are keeping.

For anything you cannot replace — vintage, inherited, wedding, leather, silk, embroidered or a garment that matters to you — consult a professional before doing anything yourself. A failed repair on such a garment usually cannot be undone.

When your description indicates such a garment, this service still shows you the approaches and every risk attached to them, and it places that advice above the results rather than below them. It does not provide a step sequence for such a garment, on any plan.