Monday Mending

Mending is not usually exciting and it wasn’t this time either. It is easy to put off in favor of all the other exciting projects that are begging to get into my UFO pile (ha ha ha).

There are no pictures of the first mending being it was on a fitted sheet. If you’ve seen one fitted sheet, you’ve seen them all (booooooor-ing). The elastic on the fitted sheet for a king sized bed had DIED. It was no longer stretchy in any sense. Opening up the seam, the new elastic was pinned to the old elastic. Then the old elastic could be used to pull the new elastic through the channel. It mostly worked. Coming around the last bend and the two elastics parted ways. Opening another little hole in the channel seamed allowed for a safety pin to be attached to the new elastic and used to feed it through it’s remaining journey.

The new elastic was really shock cord, used for repairing collapsing tent poles. DW suggested it. I thought, “why not”? I don’t know how it will hold up in the wash. We will just find out as we go. Because it was cord, instead of flat elastic, I didn’t trust in just sewing the two ends of the elastic together. I planned to tie the ends into a knot.

You know what? King sized fitted sheets have A LOT of channel to feed elastic through. Once all fed through, it still needed to be shortened so that it would need to be stretched to hold it on the mattress (there was too much in the channel). Laying the sheet on the bed, top down and elastic side facing the ceiling. I smoothed out the flat (top) part of the fitted sheet and arranged the sides to fold over, on top, of the flat part. Thus allowing me to gauge when the sides had been gathered enough to be effective, but not too much. The gathering part was a slow process. It was easy to slide the fabric along the cord, but only so much fabric could be bunched up at a time before it wouldn’t keep sliding. Then I would move a little further along the channel and slide that bunched up fabric forward and so on.

When the desired amount of gathering was accomplished, the cord was tied in a know and the extra was cut off. The knot was just bulky enough that it would have made it difficult to seem up the holes in the channel. Carefully tugging, the knot was pulled into the channel far enough to be out of the way. Machine sewed the holes closed and VOILA!

(sorry for so much detail. Yes, it is just a fitted sheet. But it ended up being quite the undertaking. A little over 3 hours total. They were TV hours though. It was good to keep hands busy)

The second mending was a little different.

Pixie LOVES this toy. But, she also loves to pick open seams and remove the guts from her toys. Despite the ever looming threat that I will throw her toys away if she pulls the stuffing out, she continues to do it. If I catch her at it and ask, “What are you doing”? She appears to respond, “Nothing. Whatever are you referring to”? :-/

It was a super easy fix:

• First, gather up all the guts laying about all over the living room floor.
• Poke the guts back in
• Add more stuffing
• Sew hole closed
• Done

I was much too lazy to get up, walk down the hall to sewing room and get some matching thread. The black heavy duty thread was already right there. I decided it was a design choice. That I was channeling my inner Tim Burton. I don’t know that Pixie entirely believed me.