mending Archives - Page 2 of 10

Let’s 80s this up!

I retrieved a red stretch-velvet dress from my parents’ garage sale pile. Such promise!

But look at that grody symmetry and those heinous sagging shoulders. This dress needed some help.

A probably-unreasonable amount of time later….

Yes! Savory.

What I did:
Installed a strip of gathered tulle into each sleeve cap to puff it up (sewn to the armhole seam allowance facing into the sleeve).
Added large shoulder pads VERY loosely based on Sew Retro Rose’s shoulder-pad-making tutorial. I tacked them at the shoulder seam on each end.
Undid my mother’s hacky size adjustment and replaced it with my own hackier size adjustment.
Re-hemmed it to a slant, losing 7+ inches on one side and keeping it as long as possible on the other.
Added ruffles down one side of the neckline and across to the opposite waist, chosen to point at the top of the hem rather than be semi-parallel to it.

The ruffles don’t hold up to inspection if you look too closely at them – I was running out of time before the night I wanted to wear the dress, so I had to be hacky again. I took three wide strips of crepe-backed satin, folded them lengthwise so the satin was out, pressed, folded the ends in and topstitched, and zig-zagged twice to hold and bind the edge. Then I gathered each about 3/8″ from the edge and secured it with more stitching. I stacked them together starting with the topmost ruffle, seam allowance to the right, then the bottom ruffle (which was slightly wider), seam allowance to the left and barely overlapping the top ruffle, and finally the middle ruffle, seam allowance to the left and mostly overlapping the top ruffle. After they were all together and sewn to the dress, shoulder seam to side seam, I folded the top ruffle over and secured it with hand-stitching.

My original design inspiration was the television series Dynasty, with help from my Bangles albums. I had to buy the makeup for this because I don’t think I’ve worn blush in twenty years. Special thanks to my sister for inspiring the slant hem with her aesthetic advice to try to look like “an unstable stack of geometric shapes” and to my mother for suggesting the ruffles.

Darned denim

Today was Day 14 of a 15×15 challenge: downsize and organize in the sewing room 15 minutes per day for 15 days. It was born of realizing the morning of the 17th that, counting that day, there were exactly 15 days of January left, and it’s been incredible. Surfaces don’t have piles on them! Getting to the back of the closet doesn’t require moving things! There is even open space on more than one shelf! Right now there are large bags of trash, recycling, and donations taking up space in the room, but tomorrow’s 15 minutes will culminate with their ceremonious removal.

Today I sorted through some hanging shelves in the closet. One stack included a lot of cut and torn denim. When I learned how to darn, I was infatuated with the idea of it. Hand-darning has lost its luster, but for a while (also influenced by the denim repurposing adventures and the book Mend it Better) I had the idea to make a denim mending sampler, and maybe even a denim bag or basket that would feature a variety of mends in the same few bright colors. I believe the following darned tear was destined for the latter project.

It’s mended with all six strands of some bright variegated embroidery floss.

That project is not sticking around; there will always be higher-priority sewing and embroidery. However, I wanted to show it off, because it is quite pretty I think, and it also made me think of this picture:

This is a poor picture of the knee of a pair of my husband’s jeans, posted on my personal blog some 14 months ago but never seen here. I machine-darned this tear by following the grain of the denim, stitching in the ravines except for quick stitches over the wales to get from ravine to ravine. It is perhaps the most invisible mend I’ve ever done (the photo actually makes it more apparent, which is useful for teaching I suppose), and I have an idea to improve it. Here’s the ideal process, where step 2 is the one I failed to do in this mend:

1. Fuse a piece of iron-on tricot to the inside of the knee, large enough to extend into good fabric in all directions (typically a tear happens because the fabric is weak in that area).
2. Secure the white threads by stitching around the interior of the tear in a flattened oval.
3. With a shortened stitch, sew along the grain of the denim about every 3rd ravine, moving between ravines by stitching perpendicular to the grain, and covering the whole weak area, extending the stitching into the good fabric. This secures the tricot and spreads the stress out.
4. Over just the torn part and immediate vicinity, sew as in step 3 but in every ravine (or at least the ones you didn’t stitch in before). This helps prevent fraying and covers a bit more of the white threads.

I don’t anticipate much hand-mending of denim in my future. This mend lasted the remaining life of the jeans and took a quarter of the time hand-darning would have.

S(h)aving sweaters

A black sweater hung abandoned in my closet for a long, long time (two years? more?) because it was covered in white or off-white pills. It was such a mess that I didn’t want to look at it, much less be seen in public in it. During my wardrobe reset over the holidays I decided to finally fix it.

My first try was a safety razor, having repeatedly seen the “life hack” of using one to remove pills. It didn’t work at all. I then turned to my battery-operated sweater shaver, which works much better, but was going to take probably 8 AA batteries to finish the whole thing. After that realization I thought I’d better give the safety razor another try, and grabbed a different brand. That one worked like a charm!

I didn’t take a full “before” picture, but here’s the front cleared by battery and back half hand-shaved.

sweater front cleaned by electric pill remover

Some consideration and the testing of yet a third brand of disposable razor has led me to conclude the key is widely-spaced blades. The original razor’s blades were very close together, which for hair is fine, but for large lint balls is not. Now, I did go through a couple of razors as well (my sweater is acrylic; as with all synthetics that probably contributed to speedier dulling of blades than a natural fiber would have), and a bunch of lint roller sheets, but it still seems more environmental than a bunch of batteries, and certainly was more economical.

Here’s a picture comparing the razor that did work to the razor that didn’t. You can hopefully see the difference in blade spacing.

comparison of safety razor blade spacing

Some tips:

It doesn’t have to be expensive to have widely set blades. I started with some wide, three-bladed Schick product that probably was at the upper end of disposables, but ended with the narrower, two-bladed, and almost certainly much cheaper Bic Silky Touch. It worked just as well (given the limitations of size and number of blades).

You can reduce the quantity of lint roller sheets or lengths of masking tape you use by picking the large tumbleweeds of fluff off by hand. My picture above was before I thought of that.

Shave with the grain. That is, if your sweater has ridges, ribbing, or cables, shave along them rather than across them. You want the blades as smooth against the fabric as possible to avoid gouging the yarn and creating weak spots that could turn into holes. I made an exception to this for the fuzziest part of the sweater, the bottom of the inside back, where shaving with the ridges didn’t seem to accomplish anything.

Be patient, take breaks, and clean the fluff out of your razor regularly. If the razor just stops working even after cleaning, swap it out. It’s less waste than a sweater!