I haven’t done any mending in awhile. My mending pile is a testimony to that statement.
However, I had a piece of mending that MUST be done before today. A few weeks ago (I think 3) I agreed to mend some shorts for a co-worker. This was during the Wedding dress/Wedding veil time period. Last week co-worker M asked after his shorts. I am ashamed to admit that they had gotten set aside and forgotten. I made it a point to put them at the top of my mental “to-do” list and committed to having them completed by Monday (today). Enter the weekend…
I had a fairly busy weekend! Mostly it was hanging out with the grandsons, but they are busy guys and doesn’t leave much downtime for little things like mending. I had other things to do too which led to be getting home Sunday night at 9:30pm with the mending still to do. I started gathering up the things that I needed: the shorts, the electric sewing machine, it’s power cord, some matching thread, the iron on interfacing, the foot pedal… WAIT! WHERE IS MY FOOT PEDAL? I can’t make the machine sew without my foot pedal! I live in a 600sqft apartment. How hard can it be to locate one sewing machine’s foot pedal? As it turns out, pretty much impossible. At least it was last night. On to plan B.
I texted my friend D, to let her know that I was not going to make our walking appointment at 0530 the next morning. I took the thread off the electric sewing machine and put it on my treadle machine. I loaded another bobbin with matching thread (the machines do not have compatible bobbins) and I began sewing. This fix was kind of like (very loosely speaking) a darning. The fabric had stress wear. I ironed on a small piece of interfacing on the inside of the shorts. Then I sewed a short line of stitches crossing over the tear, stopped, turned the sewing around, and sewed back the same distance but only at a slight angle to be near the last line of stitches but not directly atop of them. On the treadle machine this…took…f o r e v e r.
I don’t know if you have ever sewn using a treadle machine. I enjoy using one immensely. The sound and movement of the treadle is soothing to me. However, when all I have to do is sew about 5-7 stitches and then stop, turn and sew another 5-7 stitches, it is frustrating. I can’t just start treadling, I have to use my hand on the wheel to begin the machine sewing in the forward direction. If it starts sewing backwards, the thread gets all tangled up underneath and I’d have to stop and fix it before starting over. About the time that I had the machine stitching in the correct direction, it was time to stop and turn. Even though it took much longer than I had anticipated to do the repair, I was much pleased with how the repair turned out. As was M! 😀
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