Miscellaneous Mends

Here's a few things I've mended recently!

My shoe that I got at Goodwill and only wore a handful of times before it started to do this:

Those little strappy-bandy bits were coming off, so I glued 'em the fuck down!

About once a month I do volunteer mending over at Repair PDX, which is where people just bring in their busted goods and then volunteers with different specialties fix 'em back up. Normally I completely forget to take any pictures, but this time I remembered! ....Although... I'm actually a little sheepish about sharing these ones? Because these aren't my best mends. Uhg, I hate it when people do that, when they go out of their way to show you something they made and then they're like "Oh, this is horrible, I can do better, I swear!!!" But, uh...

I can do better, I swear!!!

This is a big ol' soft scarf that moths got into:

And this is a coat sleeve:

There's a mix of sewists who show up; some hand sew (me!), some machine sew, and some do a combo of both. Originally I was hand-hemming a guy's shirt and my neighbor had just taken on darning a lady's sleeve hole by hand and we swapped since she could finish hemming the guy's shirt in just a few minutes with her machine (which she prefers to use) and I could go to town darning (which I enjoy a lot more, though it's still a skill I'm... working on. Loooooots of room for improvement. But good enough to get the job done!)

Other things I have mended for strangers but did not photograph: a doll dress, a leather purse, a goth rave dress, a dog bed, and many, many more things that I'm not even remembering right now. I love sewing at Repair PDX.

Which brings me to my final mend for this post, which had absolutely nothing to do with my volunteer gig:

A friend inherited some pants emblazoned with a repeating pattern of embroidered Mickey Mice (Sorry, I didn't get a picture of them right-side-out) but they were just a bit too baggy on him, so he... Oh my god. Why don't I remember the word for this? Is it still "hemming" when you make a garment tighter around your limbs? Anyway, he made the inside seam of his pants snugger with his sewing machine, but he didn't have a serger so his new seams were left exposed and were already fraying.

And then I bullied him into giving me his pants so I could add a blanket stitch (my fav) by hand all along the exposed edge which wouldn't completely stop the fraying, but it'd still slow it down more than without it. He only relented when I convinced him that repetitively hand sewing for hours at a time is actually fun for me.

And it WAS fun.

This is how I have fun, godamnit!

This is the end of my update, good bye.