Rose decided to kill one of my polo wraps last week. As I was mid-wrap on her hind right leg she decided to get all frigidity in the cross ties. Given my current physical state, it's hard for me to jump up and out of the way, so I have to be a bit more mindful of my proximity to Miss Thing when squatting on the ground. I dropped the wrap, got out of the way and waited for her to stand still again. In the process she stepped on the un-wrapped portion of the wrap with her right hind foot, moved her left hind in the opposite direction, and tore the wrap in half.
My first reaction was to toss the wrap in the trash and bemoan needing to buy another set. Honestly, I'm not a big fan of these ancient green ones, but at the same time with baby coming in less than nine weeks I have to be buying cloth diapers these days not polo wraps. After longeing her, it occurred to me that I could sew the wrap back together. So I grabbed the wrap from the trash bin and inspected the tear. It was nearly a clean tear straight across and indeed repairable. Yea, $20 to the diaper fund!
DIY Polo Wrap Repair
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| Torn Polo Wrap |
After taking the wrap home and digging out my sewing machine, I inspected the wraps to evaluate the tear. My goal was to take off as little material as possible, so as to not shorten the wrap too much. Since I was repairing these myself, I didn't bother putting them in the wash first. This made deciphering the "right" and "wrong" sides of the wrap easy.
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| Line up wraps, wrong sides together. |
The next step was to match the two right sides (the side that the Velcro is on) of the wrap together, so the wrong sides are facing out. I made sure that the two pieces were parallel and lined the torn edges up in preparation for cutting.
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| Quilting square and rotary cutter |
Since I'm in the midst of making a baby quilt, I happen to have my quilting stuff handy at the moment. If you don't have quilting supplies laying about, using a ruler, pen, and a set of sharp scissors would work well. I wanted my cut edge to be nice and square, so I used my square template to line up the edges of the wraps and my rotary cutter to cut the edge. Very easy!
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| Clean, cut edge. |
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| Sewing the edges. |
Next I went to my sewing machine and straight stitched a 1/4" seam.
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| 1/4" seam. |
All done. The seam is on the wrong side, so that it will be against the leg once wrapped and not visible. With a little luck I'll get some more life out of these wraps!
Happy trails and swooshing tails!
•DS•
I am all for re-use, re-do and re-cycle. Horses are expensive to keep, and it is always good to pinch where we can. :)
ReplyDeleteAwesome!! I love making my own horse stuff (halters, cavessons, bitless bridle, etc). This is a great quick fix. :D And I got my polo wraps as a gift in secret Santa one year so even more awesome lol. Now maybe I won't be afraid to use them for fear of messing them up. I should pull those out and learn to wrap them. They are white so I should do it now while Chrome is still dark. When he turns gray it won't look as nice hehe.
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