Tag: mending

Mending coats

I’ve done a lot of coat mending this winter. First was a donation coat that came to the Sew-op via a member of the Co-op. It needed a new zipper and had one pinned to it. It sat there a little while before I took it home, put in the new zipper, secured a seam that was coming loose, removed a clear-plastic ID pocket that was fragmenting, repaired a torn pocket – and mended a small hole that I nipped into it when removing the old zipper. After a trip through the washing machine it went to the local shelter’s closet for someone to stay warm in.

I didn’t photograph it really, except for this:

zipper replacement basting

I tried the method of basting all the layers of the coat together prior to removing the zipper, so they stay put for installation of the new zipper. I had to do it twice because, unbeknownst to me, the lining was puffed up close to the zipper. You can see my stitching above the top piece of velcro. I didn’t have to baste both sides because the other had a seam line entirely inside the zipper.

When we were visiting my grandmother over Christmas, we went to a consignment store and a thrift store, and I bought a coat at each one. Vermont is definitely a place where a coat wardrobe sees use, and mine needed some upgrading. The first purchase was at the consignment store, where I found a nice long heavy coat… that needed some button help.

loose buttons fixed buttons

brown coat

Such is the way of secondhand wardrobes. By the way, looks notwithstanding, that coat is entirely synthetic.

We went to the thrift store second, and I found a nice corduroy jacket for spring and fall. It just needed a little snag fixed up.

red coat hole

I was pleased with how the repair came out, especially since I didn’t actually have matching thread.

fixed hole fixed hole interior

And there we are! A decent percentage of my coat wardrobe changed out – I donated two of my previous coats to make room for these.

FYDP Roundup 2

A little less exuberant this week, but I still got some things done. I admit, though, that everything on today’s list was completed in the last 40 hours or so. Good thing I have the potential public shame of this roundup to motivate me!

  1. Behind the scenes, I improved the SEO of the patterns in my store by giving them meta descriptions (this becomes the excerpt/blurb you see on a search engine results listing). Without a meta description, the part of the page below the photos (where I put the details, but not the overview) is what shows up on the search page. Now someone finding one of my patterns through a search will have better information about what it is they’ve found; the meta description is a version of what appears to the right of the photos on the product page.
  2. Less behind the scenes but still online, long ago I had links to pages at Annie’s Attic with brief Quicktime videos of crochet stitches being made. They were linked from my Crochet Reference page and possibly my Learn Crochet series, though probably only before it was expanded from a single page into a set. Annie’s took them down, replacing them with longer YouTube videos, which I found very disappointing. Later on, but still rather a while ago (cough cough), I found the videos still existed at Annie’s online magazine Crochet World, and wrote a note to reinstate the links. Well, that finally happened!
  3. An embroidery project I was maybe 1/3 of the way through was not going well. I dismantled it.
  4. My boot-style slippers each had a split up the back of the lining, and my heel would slide into the bottom of the split instead of fully into the slipper. I stitched them up.

Totals:

  1. Mending: 2
  2. Non-mend sewing: 2
  3. Elimination: 7
  4. Website updates: 2

FYDP Roundup 1

Starting strong with finishing my dang projects! I’ve decided the roundups are only going to contain projects I’ve already blogged or never will blog, so they don’t reference the future. This will necessitate a final roundup after the quarter ends, but that’s okay.

I took care of some low-hanging fruit this week.

  1. Two pairs of boxers for Matt that were done but for the waist and leg openings: finished sewing.
  2. Remnant earmarked for boxers: realized that because of snags, it was not quite enough fabric for boxers; decommissioned and put into the stash.
  3. A bra that rubbed my shoulder blade: trimmed the fabric sticking out past the stitching, and that seems to have fixed it.
  4. Two t-shirts and a sweatshirt waiting on possible refashioning: donated.
  5. A blanket I started crocheting and wasn’t very excited by (yarn choice or stitch pattern): frogged, yarn put away.
  6. A Swiffer Wet Jet pad I was Tunisian-crocheting, but wasn’t thrilled with and probably wasn’t going to use anyway: frogged, yarn put away.

Totals:

  1. Mending: 1
  2. Non-mend sewing: 2
  3. Elimination: 6