Mending crazy!

 

I’ve been inspired by the internet to get on with my mending pile. Yes, it’s been an ongoing ambition for some time now, and I’d got as far as gathering it all together, cataloguing it on Trello, and buying a giant plastic storage box from IKEA to house it all, yet still the pile remained. Albeit safely contained in a plastic crate. Don’t want dangerously unmended items on the loose, now, do we?!

But now I’ve cleared the vast majority of it. What changed, I hear you ask?

Inspired by Melly’s January challenge I divided my mending up into 6 piles, according to what the next step was:

• Needs either cutting or seam ripping.
• Needs a trip into the loft to find some fabric for patching.
• Needs hand sewing.
• Needs pressing.
• Needs the sewing machine.
• Needs the overlocker.
• Needs more thought/trying on before deciding on the next step.

I’ve ranked those in relative order of difficulty, with the first being the easiest to accomplish, and then put them into cloth bags within the big plastic mending crate. Most of the bags are now empty–it’s amazing how much I can achieve while sitting on the bathroom floor while the kids splash about in the bath! Here are some of the things that are now back in use:

 

 

I still have a few items in the “Needs more thought” bag, and a couple of annoyingly fiddly bits of hand sewing, but I’m now feeling really positive about my mending pile. It is conquerable!

 

What I’m wondering is why I always build the idea of mending up into this impossibly difficult task? It really isn’t. One of the items (a snagged jumper) took all of about five seconds to mend, once I’d located my snag repair needle. The aforementioned needle is now in my little sewing pouch so it should be easier to find in future, and I’m really hoping I can get on with little jobs like that as they appear so that the pile doesn’t grow any larger. I got to test that out when a pair of (relatively) expensive tights I was wearing got snagged. Twenty minutes of sitting with a blunt ended needle and gently teasing the (fortunately unbroken) yarn back into looser stitches has resulted in an invisible mend. And there was me thinking they would ladder and I’d have to throw them away. Result! I can heartily recommend White Stuff tights for being remarkably snag and ladder resistant. This is coming from a woman with cats and a toddler 😛

 

Anyone else out there find the idea of mending far more daunting than the reality? And does anyone have any good mending tips?