Category: Display

Display

A patch jacket is a composition, not a pile. The ones that look right have usually been laid out flat, photographed, and rearranged three times before a single stitch went in.

Choosing the jacket

Almost any jacket can carry patches, but some make the job much easier. What you are looking for is flat area and access to the inside.

• Denim and canvas trucker jackets are the default for a reason: stiff, flat panels, unlined, and the seams divide the back into a natural composition area.
• Leather and denim vests give you the largest uninterrupted back panel of anything. Leather needs a leather needle and no heat at all.
• Letterman and varsity jackets are traditionally chenille territory. The wool body takes stitches well; the leather sleeves need the same treatment as any hide.
• Avoid, or plan carefully: quilted and padded jackets, where stitching passes through the wadding and puckers; anything lined, where you cannot reach the back of your own work; and technical shells, which should not be pierced at all.

Second-hand is worth considering for a first one. A jacket you are not afraid of is a jacket you will actually finish.

Lay it out before you sew anything

1. Put the jacket flat on the floor, back panel up, and smooth it out.
2. Arrange every patch you own on it. All of them, including the ones you are not sure about.
3. Photograph it from directly above, standing on a chair.
4. Take half the patches off and photograph it again.
5. Compare the two photographs the next day. The second one is usually better.

The photograph is the point of the exercise. Standing over an arrangement, your eye corrects for perspective and forgives crowding; a photograph does neither. It is also the only way to compare two arrangements honestly, because you cannot hold the first one in your head while you build the second.

The back panel

The back is the piece people see, and it is worth composing deliberately rather than filling. The classic arrangement is a large centre piece with a band above and a band below, all three the same width and evenly spaced.

If that gives you pause, the alternatives are good: one large centre piece alone, a dense mosaic with no hierarchy, or a vertical column down one side of the centre seam.

Sleeves, chest and the rest

• Sleeves are a tube. Open the cuff seam or work on a free arm, or you will sew the sleeve shut — a mistake almost everyone makes once.
• Upper sleeve patches sit best about an inch below the shoulder seam, matching on both sides if you use two.
• Chest patches go on the wearer’s left as a default, and stay clear of the button placket. A patch straddling the opening is the most common avoidable error.
• Pocket flaps take small patches well and are the easiest place to start, because they come apart from the rest of the jacket.
• Collar and cuffs only take very small pieces, and they abrade faster than anywhere else.

Measured placement conventions for each of these are in the placement guides.

Attaching them

Denim will take an iron, and iron-on will hold on denim better than on most fabrics. It still lifts. On a jacket that is going to be worn hard, heat is for positioning and thread is for holding.

1. Heat-tack or pin each patch in place, working from the photograph rather than by eye.
2. Sew around the border with a backstitch by hand, or a straight stitch just inside the border by machine, using a heavy needle and strong thread.
3. Work the back panel first while the jacket is still easy to handle, then the sleeves, then the front.
4. Support the weight of the jacket as you sew so it is not dragging on the seam — that is what causes puckering, more often than tension.

Full method, including which fabrics rule heat out entirely, is in how to apply a patch. If some patches should be swappable, a hook-and-loop panel lets you change them without unpicking anything.

Living with it

• Wash inside out, cold, gentle cycle, and not often. A patch jacket is not a garment that benefits from washing.
• Air it rather than washing it wherever you can.
• Never tumble dry. Heat plus mechanical action is exactly the pair that lifts edges.
• Re-stitch a lifting corner the week you notice it. A lifted corner becomes a lost patch within a month.

Patches you take off are worth keeping properly — see displaying a patch collection for storage that does not damage them.

Common questions

Display

A patch collection has two enemies and neither of them is dust. Light fades thread permanently, and adhesive of any kind destroys the thing it is holding. Everything sensible about displaying patches follows from those two facts.

The two things that actually damage a collection

Light

Dyed thread fades, and it fades unevenly — reds and purples go first, and a patch that has hung on a sunlit wall for two summers will have a visible shadow line where the frame edge protected it. This is not reversible. If a patch matters, it does not go opposite a window, and it does not go under a spotlight.

If a display has to live in a bright room, UV-filtering glazing helps a great deal and costs a little more than ordinary glass. It slows the process rather than stopping it.

Adhesive

Glue, double-sided tape, mounting putty and self-adhesive album pages all fail the same way: the adhesive migrates into the base cloth, stains it from behind, hardens, and eventually cannot be removed without taking threads with it. Album pages sold as “magnetic” are the worst of these — they are not magnetic, they are adhesive, and they yellow.

The rule that solves it: every mounting method should be reversible in five minutes with nothing sharper than a seam ripper. If it is not, do not use it.

Four methods that work

1. Framed, stitched to a mount board

The best-looking option and the kindest to the patch. The patch is held with a few loops of fine thread passed through an acid-free mount board, and a spacer keeps the glazing off the surface so the thread is not crushed flat against glass.

• Acid-free board, front and back. Ordinary mount card is acidic and will yellow the patch from behind within a few years, in a rectangle you can see.
• A spacer — a strip of board inside the rebate, or a deep box frame. Thread pressed against glass flattens permanently and picks up condensation.
• Fine thread, matched to the patch, in a handful of loops through the border. Not through the embroidery.
• A sealed back, taped along the frame edge, to keep dust and insects out.

2. A felt or canvas banner

The traditional Scout and club solution, and it scales better than framing. Patches are sewn to a length of felt, canvas or heavy cotton with a dowel top and bottom. It rolls for storage, it can grow, and nothing is permanent.

Choose a fabric heavy enough not to sag between patches. Lay the whole arrangement out flat and photograph it before you sew anything, because the composition is much easier to fix on the floor than on the wall.

3. Pinned to a covered board

A cork or foam board covered in fabric, with patches held by stainless steel pins through the border. Fully reversible, endlessly rearrangeable, and the cheapest of the four.

Use stainless or brass pins. Ordinary steel dressmaker’s pins rust in a few humid seasons and the rust marks are permanent.

4. Album pages

For a collection too large to display at once. Use archival polypropylene or Mylar pages — the same ones coin and stamp collectors use — and avoid PVC, which off-gasses and softens over time. Store the album flat rather than upright so the patches do not slump inside their pockets.

Arranging it

The composition is what makes a display look considered rather than accumulated. Three things do most of the work.

• Pick one alignment and hold it. Either everything is on a grid, or everything is deliberately loose. A grid with three patches slightly off it looks like a mistake; a genuinely free arrangement does not.
• Let the gaps be even, not the patches. Patches are different sizes and shapes. Equal spacing between edges reads as ordered; trying to make the patches themselves line up does not work.
• Put the largest piece off-centre. Dead centre makes everything else look like it is orbiting. A third of the way in gives the eye somewhere to start.

If the collection has a story — a sequence of ranks, a run of years, a tour — arrange it in that order and the display explains itself without a caption.

Cleaning, carefully

Most patches need nothing more than a soft brush. If one genuinely needs cleaning, test on the back first, work with the smallest amount of moisture that does anything, and never soak a patch with a felt base or a paper-stiffened back.

Storage for what is not on the wall

• Flat, not folded. A fold line in a stiff patch becomes a crack.
• Acid-free tissue between layers, not cling film or a plastic bag.
• Somewhere with a stable temperature. Lofts and garages swing too far and condense.
• Away from the wardrobe. Moths eat wool felt bases, and plenty of older patches have one.

Related: what your patches are made of decides how delicate they are, and how to identify and date an old patch covers the construction features worth recording before anything goes behind glass.

Common questions