I bought the Bose Quiet Comfort QC15 headphones about 5 or 6 years ago. They are great. However, one of the ear pads started coming apart, and no sooner did that one finish unraveling, the other side started. The headphones were still usable but much less comfortable and didn’t stay in place on my head. eBay has ‘replacements’ but the comments regarding the fit were not flattering. I figured it would be worth trying to fix them on my own, because, well, I’d have to order some crappy replacements anyways so I might as well really ruin the originals first.

You can see in the photo to the right that there was a seam that came undone completely around the inside of the pad exposing the green foam inside. Close inspection shows that the seam was originally glued, it just came un-glued. I wasn’t going to be able to make a nice glue joint so I decided to sew the two pieces of material back together instead. There’s a stitch called an ‘invisible stitch’ or ‘pillow stitch’ where the thread is not visible after sewing. I figured I’d give that a try with some black thread and cross my fingers that it didn’t look too horrible, or more importantly, didn’t feel horrible. The photo to the left shows how the stitch works, and when pulled tight, almost disappears.

Invisible Stitch

Luckily, the pads can snap out of the headphones fairly easily. It’s much easier to work on these when the pads are out of the headphones. Below, you can see how they look as they are sewn around the inside, securing the two sides together. In the right-most photo there is green foam visible, this wasn’t a mistake. Not clearly shown in the photo, there are a series of holes around the inside piece of the material. The foam is peeking out there.

I can say with 100% certainty that these are headphones are way better after this repair. They are more comfortable, they don’t flop around and they don’t look as dumb. Noise-cancelling-wise, I didn’t notice a big difference. Overall, it took maybe 45 minutes to do both headphone pads. A seasoned sewer could probably bang this out much quicker. They came out good, I saved some money, didn’t have to wait for replacements and I’d do it again if need be.