With temperatures falling to below zero, I count my wool sweaters as close a set of friends as any humans I know. But it seems every single one of them needs some kind of mending.
And what is mending if not a task to be accomplished in the comfort of the favorite chair and with a reward at hand for a job well done?
Oh yes. I've stocked up on candy canes so I can enjoy them into spring.
Here a cashmere thrift store find with a small hole gets some love in the form of a woven heart. Mending = Love.
Buttons either seem to disappear completely, become VERY loose with that wobbly "hope-it-stays-on-until-I-get-home" bit of thread, of it pulls off leaving a hole where the button used to be attached.
This super fantastic tutorial from Threads magazine explains how to solve that last problem with clear instructions and great photos.
If you need to repair a hole where a button has fallen off of your jacket, blouse, or skirt, just click, go, and sew. And another find for this fix.
Oh, that thinned out, worn bed sheet area. It's one area. Why does the rest of the sheet look fine?
Here are several tutorials on how to mend your sheets and make then last much longer. Why should you? if you're like me, you like all cotton sheets. Not the new ones that are scratchy and have a very low thread count. Or even the new Egyptian cotton ones that are made with so many chemicals, they don't have that fresh dried-in-the-sunshine smell. Oh, no siree! I mean those old Cannon, USA made sheets that can only be found in thrift stores.
So I do anything I can to extend the life of these thick and delicious babies once they start to thin out. Which by the way, takes me years to do. These old sheets last longer than any new ones I've bought in the last 20 years.
Mending a bed sheet
How to mend a bed sheet
Sheet mending day
Mending a bed sheet hole
My mother used to mend the small holes by simple darning the hole with the sewing machine. By this, I mean she sewed back and forth on the sewing machine in one direction completely covering the small hole, and then she sewed back and forth perpendicular to (across) the first stitching. This covered the hole completely and made a new fabric.
