The Tiny $10 Item That Will Save Your Trip When Your Most Expensive Gear Fails

Move over, duct tape: An outdoor-specific sewing kit—and the know-how to use it—might just be the most useful repair gear you bring.

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Gear Aid Sewing Kit (Photo: Courtesy)

When an important piece of gear breaks, it never seems to happen on a short trip. From separated pack zippers to torn midlayers to dodgy waterproofing on tents, my equipment always chooses the most remote place possible to keel over. Thus was it that I found myself perched on a chair under our rafting group’s cook shelter one evening in Canada’s Northwest Territories, trying to sew my shoe back together.

I was  just a few nights into a weeklong rafting trip on the Nahanni River with Nahanni River Adventures, and already my dry backpack’s straps had completely separated from its packbag, forcing me to jury-rig it back together with a carabiner and ski straps. That’s when I noticed my toe peeking out from the upper of my trail runners. At some point while I was helping to haul our group’s gear down the nearly mile-long portage past Virginia Falls, I had snagged my toe on a rock and torn the socklike mesh upper of my shoe open without realizing it. By the time I noticed, the rip had widened to the size of a quarter.

I didn’t have a second pair of shoes–I had accidentally left my boots back at our hotel in Fort Simpson. What I did have, nestled in the bottom of my repair kit, was a travel-sized sewing kit. I pulled out a length of black thread, threaded it through a needle, used the thimble to push it through the tough, synthetic leather strip next to the rip in the mesh, and began to stitch.

When it comes to fixing tears in ripstop nylon, dyneema, and the other gossamer synthetics that make up modern jackets and lightweight tents, adhesive patches are my weapon of choice. For everything else, I have my sewing kit. I’ve used it to mend torn seams on my pants, fix drawstrings back into place on my overnight packs, and, on a few occasions now, tack my shoes back together. (Some of those shoe fixes are temporary, but they generally last long enough for me to finish up my trip. On the Nahanni, my impromptu repair job held together until our last day on the river. It was a better-looking, less gummy, and usually tougher fix than duct tape, anyway.)

A standard-issue travel sewing kit from any airport newsstand will work in a pinch. I prefer to roll with a slightly bigger needle than the flimsy numbers those usually include, though. A light heavy-duty or upholstery needle will handle everything from a backpack’s thick fabric to your tent’s pole sleeves. And while I’ve patched gear with dental floss, I’ve found heavy-duty thread—polyester, #69 or thicker—to hold better and pull more easily. I won’t pretend my stitching looks professional—I’m not the kind of person who makes my own gear at home, and I can still tell where the factory seam on my Fjallraven Kajka pack ends and my crooked patch job begins. But when you’re days away from your gear closet, self-sufficiency is priceless.

The Best Sewing Kit for Field Repairs: Gear Aid Sewing Kit

$10 at Feral

While it’s easy to build your own lightweight sewing kit—grab a heavy-duty needle and 20 feet or so of thread—Gear Aid’s kit is a ready-made, all-in-one alternative. The kit comes with heavy-duty thread, two sewing needles, two straight pins, two safety pins, two buttons, a thimble, and a stitch ripper. The entire thing weighs 1.6 ounces, but you can cut down the weight by taking just what you need (I never bring straight pins, a stitch ripper, or extra buttons, and instead of using a thimble I usually just resign myself to pricking my fingers.)