Masking tape is great for fixing a pants hem.

One of my best friends spent most of college with a skirt she'd hemmed using duct tape. It worked!

Duct Tape.

That Mighty Mendit stuff works surprisingly well for some TV product. It has served a lot of other purposes beyond fabric glue/bonding/whatever too.

I've also got a portable sewing kit that's fairly small--don't see what's wrong with having one of those handy.

Black sharpies are also great for fixing small bleach spots on clothing. One of my favorite black shirts somehow came out of the wash missing some color in a few places (which is really weird cause I don't use bleach and I own my own washer) and a sharpie fixed it right up. About every 10 washings I need to touch it up again.

The liner in my dress shoes kept coming out, so I just stapled it down (they were $6 on clearance three years ago and they need to last dammit!). I've also done the black Sharpie leather shoe repair trick. It's not a very noticeable repair unless you're looking for it.

Shout wipes and safety pins. I ALWAYS have safety pins with me. Always.

@CFinWV: Or even cello tape. But you have to do it correctly. You'd be surprised how many people attempt to place the tape ALONG the hem (horizontally). It just does not work that way. You must use pieces of tape ACROSS the hem (vertically).

If you're wearing a knit garment and a button comes off where it would gap embarrassingly, you can often thread a paper clip through the fabric where the button was and then "button" the buttonhole over the paper clip. If you have a pair of needlenose pliers handy, you can even twist the wire into an attractive (OK, comparatively attractive) shape.

i can actually remember that in Kindergarten (1990) i accidentally cut my sweatshirt. and not knowing any better i decided to glue it back together with elmers white glue. not realizing that it wouldn't set up with me constantly moving. basically i got in trouble and i had to miss out on show and tell.

@Fanboy1217: More evidence that being proactive gets you nowhere. :-)

Double sided tape.

A guy at work touched up a pen mark on his shirt with Whiteout. He doesn't work here anymore.

When I came back to work from maternity leave I discovered too late that my new baby-feeding assets were causing an embarrassing gap in my button-up shirt. I put a strip of packing tape on the inside and that kept everything together until I got home.

Now to replace all the button-ups in my work wardrobe....

Remember that the "weird" stapling option on your stapler that doesn't fold the staple onto itself is called the "pinning" setting. It's for attaching fabric together temporarily so you can remove the staple later after joining the fabric more permanently.

It's come in handy for me here and there.

@undefined: @Fanboy1217: totally off topic but DAMN I FEEL OLD!!! You were in kindergarten when in 1990?! Oy!

I used to White Out my Adidas shell top sneakers when they started yellowing.

@speedwell, avatar of snark: Alternatively, you can use the needle-nose pliers to bend the paper clip or pin so it loops through the fabric and button, then twisting it around to secure the button back in place. I've fixed a number of buttons in this fashion, and the fix usually holds up longer than the original thread.

duct tape beats staples hands down every time.

@Ratty:
No kidding- Have people forgotten how to sew?

I almost always have a needle and thread.

@Adrienne Willis: I recently had to co-ordinate with people who were _born_ in 1993. I felt old like you wouldnt believe it.

i never had time to sew costumes completely for high school plays that only ran one weekend so i always fixed the hems with masking tape ironed on the wrong side [inside.] ironing definitely helped it last through all three days of use.

if you are a woman wearing pantyhose/stockings and having terrible static cling put some lotion on your legs right through the stockings. sure, you have to wash them more thoroughly later but your skirt didn't end up hiked up to a NSFW position during the meeting!

@Fanboy1217: I was in kindergarten in 1990 too! Ah those were some good days. Juice boxes flowed, nap time actually meant you got to sleep. I wish I had nap time now.

@PikaPikaChick: if your shirt is gaping because your boobs are too big then you do want to replace the shirts. But I've had shirts that gaped because of how they were made so I used a piece of double sided tape to keep the gap closed.

I use binder clips to cuff up my pants when its raining.

@Hil-fish: I keep a small packet of safety pins in my desk drawer at work. I also have a few small pouches I keep stocked with safety pins, band-aids, pepto bismol, and dramamine / bonine that I just throw in my carry-on with me when I travel. It's amazing how many times those safety pins have come in handy -- and not just for me. Amazing how many co-workers in the last five years have benefited...

@pecan 3.14159265: I always hated nap time in kindergarten and pre-school; I had much more interesting things to be doing.

Where is it now that I need it?!

@CFinWV: I herewith confess to using a stapler to hold up the hem on a pair of dress-pants when that candy-ass thread the tailor used fell out at an inappropriate time.

The pants were black so I positioned the stapler so the two "ends" of the staple were showing - then I touched them up with a black CD marker to mask the shine.

I was fine until I got home and fixed the hem myself.

@pecan 3.14159265: I've never met a button-down shirt that had the buttons in the right place for my chest. Ever since age 13 I've been stealthily safety-pinning every button-down shirt together between two pairs of buttons.

(I've inadvertently seen lots of other women's bras in various jobs and I always have to wonder: why did their parents let them leave the house without learning this trick?)

@Adrienne Willis: i actually just turned 23 on friday.

@pecan 3.14159265: I too was in kindegarten in the 89-90 school year. Those were the days...

Bookbinding tape is the stuff. It's heavy-duty fabric tape designed to adhere to fabric and paper to mend damaged books. I mended a skirt hem with it and it survived drycleaning. I work in a library so we always have it on hand. Black inkpad ink is also good for fixing scuffed shoes. Just tap the shoe onto the inkpad and rub in with a paper towel.

When I was 7, I returned to class from the playground with my dress ripped from hem to bodice. While the irritated teacher was puzzling over what to do, I noticed the stapler on her desk, went, "!!!!!", and quickly stapled up my dress. As my mother was in the hospital at the time and my mornings were occupied with dressing and feeding several younger siblings and fixing bag lunches for myself and my dad, I felt proud that I could manage to pull myself together for class at all--and here I'd still the presence of mind to fix my dress. I was ready for a little praise. Instead, the teacher said it would never work and sent me to my seat. I suspected it would be just fine and was injured that my cleverness wasn't noted. And it was fine. The staples held through the day. Now, decades later, that seven year old is still wanting a pat on the head. When I'm ancient and thoroughly demented and have one memory left to my name it'll probably be that one, which will have me compulsively stapling everything in sight. It's a sad world. And whoever keeps spilling the espresso coffee grounds in the freezer needs to stop it.

I am wearing a pair of jeans right now that has a paper clip on the fly zipper handle so I can zip it up and down, it's been this way for a month or so, I keep meaning to replace it but it seems to work just fine.

I also have a small sewing kit for buttons that fall off but whenever I sew a new button on I always put a drop of crazy glue on the back side where the thread is, works like a charm, I've never had one fall off twice.

I also keep a small sewing kit handy, usually one in my car and one in my desk (they multiply in my house, I don't know why).

Otherwise I'm all about paperclip hems.

Needle and thread...

@RandaPanda:

I was in kindergarten in 1970. It was fun. I had a little boyfriend named P.J. He didn't want to be my boyfriend but I made him. :)

There are some repairs that can be easily handled from your desk, like stopping the run on your stocking with some white liquid glue. Other repairs you just can't handle and you just gotta mask it as best as possible. Having an extra sweater on hand not only keeps you warm from overactive AC units, but also hides split pants in a snap.

@speedwell, avatar of snark: I once did this exact thing while on a business trip in NY. Nobody in the office had a sewing kit (like I did in my desk back home), so I used a paper clip. It held up all day, and you couldn't even tell.

@PikaPikaChick: Ha ha, "packing tape" indeed. :)

I keep a Tide pen and safety pins in my purse but sometimes I have had to use staples or tape to fix something that ripped. Sharpies color black shoes really well in a pinch also.

I don't. Fix my clothes. Screw that. I only feel like shaving 25% of the time, I'm not going to let a rip in my pants keep me down.

I'm an ugly scruffy compunerd and looking unprofessional is practically in the job description.

I will say, however, that folding out staplers and ejecting a rapid-fire stream of staples over the cube wall is much more fun that fixing a hem.

I got to work once without a belt. How I forgot it I'll never know, but in the job I did a lot of bending and such so a belt was needed to keep the pants up.

I linked together a few zip ties and laced them through the loops. Worked like a charm. At the end of the day I just had to cut them to get my pants off.

Uhhh.... it's not brain surgery to use a needle and thread, people. I can tell when you use tape or staples to fix your hems, and so can everybody else, they're just too nice to tell you. It's easy, and cheap, to do it the right way. I don't know why I'm supposed to be impressed by this article.

Enjoy permanently ruining your clothes!

@jscott73: I have a pair of jeans that fits fine, but the zipper is pretty loose and the fly always comes undone. I fashioned a hook out of a paper clip: I threaded one end through the zipper and hung the other end over the button. Completely invisible when the jeans are buttoned up and very secure.

@Etoiles: Safety pins are the only reason I personally still have any dignity left, really. I once used packing tape in a pinch, too.

I carry a package of dental floss with a sewing needle in my purse at all times. It has been very useful many times, whether losing a button or getting your pants caught on a nail and tearing them wide open. Plus, you don't need to tie a knot at the end. Just light it with a lighter and blow it out: it becomes a hard ball in place of the knot, and you don't have to fumble with tying it repeatedly in the same spot.

@Spookyooky:
Happened to me, too. Instead of zip ties, I grabbed a length of rope we use to tie down parts onto flats and made a serviceable belt with it. Apparently I'm not the only one who this happened to, because later a guy in the next shop expertly showed me how to make a perfect rope belt, and it worked beautifully.

@StitchPirate: if the hem was ever in the life of the garment ironed, tape works beautifully and invisibly. And it can be done without removing the clothing. The only place at work I could remove my slacks to hem them is the restroom, and I'm not sewing in a toilet stall.