Tag: embroidery

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Preventative Mending – Covering tiny holes

ceceliarhoden

I’ve not been able to post in a while! I’ve been busy working on The School of Needlework for Disobedient Women – which was a huge success.

When I went to get dressed today I found that one of my basic rayon dresses that I wear all the time had developed a cluster of tiny holes, giving me the opportunity to share this quick mend I do all the time.

I use my embroidery experience to cover each little hole with a star. It’s not very extravagant, but it doesn’t take long and it works really well with the stretchy rayon fabric. I’d say this is the most common mend that I do on my own clothing, it simply slows the growth of the holes down, allowing me to keep wearing my dress longer! These stretchy rayon garments aren’t great candidates for invisible mending anyways, so I went with a nice red thread, because if it’s gonna be visible, I’m gonna go all in.

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Mend March Day 15, Saggy

ceceliarhoden
May be an image of text that says '#MendMarch @VisibleMend I. Hello! 2. Kity 3. Cross 4. Fix 5. Flux 6. Extra 7. Hygge 8. Seated 9.Sated 10. Defeated 11. Hated. 12. Make Friends Make aMENDs 14. Bends 15. Saggy 16. Brag 17. My year indoors 18. Adjustmend 19. Achievemend 20. Commitmend 21. Dimensional 22. Sensational 23 Bearable 24. Shareable 25. Viral 26. Spiral 27. Brutal 28. Darn/Farm 29.In/Out 30. Holiday Home'

We’re at the #mendmarch halfway-ish point, oh boy. Today is day 15, Saggy – something I can prevent with this mend, haha. One thing I love about mending is being in a thrift store and not being turned away by something I like or need requiring mending. Today I spotted a guilty pleasure of mine, the stretchy kind of jeans that definitely do not last. I never buy them new, I just can’t bring myself to do it, but for $2.50 I picked up a pair with a broken belt loop and went to work.

This is an easy mend, and one I’d put on my “must-learn” list for anyone who wears jeans (hell, I almost never wear jeans but here I am using the skill!) I trimmed away all the fraying edges and put a piece of scrap denim on the inside of the pants, backstitching all the way around with…whatever thread happened to be sitting in my needle at the time – today it was gold.

Then, wishing desperately that I owned a thimble, I stitched the belt loop back onto the reinforced hole. All in all it was a quick mend that will probably outlast the cheap original stitching on all the other belt loops.

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Blue Cotton Shirt

ceceliarhoden

So I have this really cool 100% cotton shirt that I love, I’m pretty sure I stole it from an ex (don’t we all have those clothes?) This tear is definitely a case of me ignoring a small tear and it growing and growing. It ripped next to the seam, and frayed a lot, I had quite a bit of missing weave, the more I looked at it, I realized if I didn’t want to have to darn a tear (and when you see the darning project I’ve been working on, you’ll see why I need a break from darning!) I was going to have to put a patch in the back.

First I trimmed away most of the frayed threads to give myself clean lines to work with, and I dug into my scrap pile for the right piece of fabric to patch it with, and fussed with it for a good 20 minutes before I finally gave in and got my lazy butt off the couch for some pins to hold it in place.

I backstitched all the way around in a rectangle, but I wasn’t confident in its strength, so I added a second. I saw the opportunity to make it artistic, so I put X’s all the way down, and couched them in the middle.

I like the blue-on-blue thread, it’s a visible mend, but not too visible. I was inspired to take this route when a friend mentioned that they were not sure how acceptable visible mending would be in her workplace attire, so I decided to experiment with a few things to see what I could come up with – allowing a mend to be on display, but delicately; just another step in making visible mending an accepted norm.

If I could do anything different, I’d put this in a medium sized embroidery hoop, I think it would have helped me keep my lines much straighter.