socks appeal.

these socks are troopers. also ground zero for my experiments in various darning techniques. i thought i would share these evolutionary images of their continued frankensteinification.

happy friday!

sweater weather cometh (or time to fill in holes).

i am just about to head out to make a mountain of pom poms, but before i do i thought i would quickly share last night's mending project. above is a favourite woollen sweater vest that had gotten a little chomped by moths while we were away this summer. not wanting it to unravel completely i laid into it with some pretty lace weight yarns. expanding upon the swiss darning technique i have become some entranced by, i was extra proud in this case to actually mend holes (swiss darning is usually just use for reinforcement or decoration). i don't currently have time to explain the whole process here but basically, i made loops where there were none and pinched them with my fingers until i came back through on the next row up. thankfully, these particular moths were not too hungry. i also reinforced the weakest, most eaten parts by doubling over some sections (in a different colour for reasons of pure aesthetics). i say if your mending can't blend entirely, make it show!

aitor says it looks like a video game from the 80's.

the mending.

socks, shoulder bag, table. a pit stop means fixing the things that have been falling apart. can't see what i did to the shoulder bag? that's because my first stab at saddle stitching was so awesome! slightly less awesome is the durability of washi tape as a mending material - but it sure is purdy.

swiss miss.

by day and by night, swiss darning is a new love of my life. i had to cut myself off and get back to packing. but look how mesmerizing...

and the possibilities for this technique are extreme.

heap of faith.

does it count as a step towards resolution to simply organize the pile of mending?

no longer assless, chaps!

in keeping with my resolution to mend all my broken junk, i reinstated the posteriors on two favourite pairs of jeans yesterday. a little ironing on, a little stitching and an hour of dragon's den and i have been reunited with two old faves. sure, i look like a scare crow in that first pair. sure, i have had them since high school. but sometimes it becomes a special obsession to keep a singular article of clothes alive.

i know i am a grown-up now because i get irritated when my pants wear out. wearing out was the best part of jeans-ownership when i was a pouty teen in grunge-era vancouver. denim patches provide a happy medium between my two selves.

resolutions: mend.

i have so much broken stuff and so many of the skills necessary to fix said stuff.

this year, i am going to work mending into my life in a more regular and meaningful way. mending mondays? we will see. whatever it is, i can not continue to live with a heap of broken (usually ripped) things that i won't part with and can't use.

the mending heap i have been preparing is daunting to say the least. i have to keep reminding myself of the great feelings that will come from tackling it.

to start the year off right, i did one of my best darn jobs to date on the socks i am currently wearing. a darning mushroom goes a long way, it would seem.

basket case.

as i did some very important post-craft-fair tape surgery to the city of craft merch suitcase, i couldn't believe i didn't submit it to for keeps.

this used to be aitor's (which he will never let me forget) then i toured with it for years as a performer (which explains all the airline tape) and it has even been shipped across the continent once or twice.

needless to say, they just don't treat luggage like they use to. the innards of this guy are made of wood and all the dovetailed joins shattered immediately - let's be fair, this wasn't amish hardwood dovetailing. still, i feel a real need to keep this guy alive. now it houses all of our shirts, totes and pinback buttons and generally lives a sedentary life in our storage area in the basement of the workroom.

sleep tight, little kicker.

youthful repairs (or, why do i cling so?)

it's hard to really express the craziness of this garment but here are the sleeves of a sweater that i have been hanging onto since i was a mere teen. clearly, some kind of obsessive labour of love was undertaken in keeping it whole.

there has been a lot of cleaning and (hopefully) organizing going on around sweetie pie headquarters (aka home). this pursuit has unearthed various marvels from my past - i have been going through my own clutter as well as boxes of stuff that came to me via my family out west.

i am sharing this one with you after jen expressed an interest in the beauties of mending. i really should find a way to photograph it on me, though. this would communicate a lot about my teenage confusion over the size of my body. with sleeves that stretch to my knees, though, it is questionable as to whether a human was in mind at all when this sweater was conceived.

holes be darned.

my newly rekindled obsession with darning is overreaching my ability to make puns about it (the goal of blogs).

after last weekend's darning workshop, i went surprisingly darn-crazy and mended up some socks, my long johns and (of course) my crazy slippers. the pictures herein involve another layer of mending on said slippers with a ridiculous choice of yarn - a fancy variegated angora that leah gave me. it is probably dumb to put a yarn like that on the bottom of one's feet but i only needed to use a little bit and i wanted to see how a variegated yarn would look with this technique (for purely aesthetic reasons, naturally).

after finishing up, i finally blanket stitched the frayed edges of both slippers. they look...better. i have no pictures of that step because directly afterwards i put the slippers on and thusly coated them in their usual mat of cat hair.

then i got sick with norovirus and had a very bad couple of days. i strongly recommend darning over norovirus, should you ever have the option to choose.

a stitch in time.

i never make my stitches in time and i never save nine.

that is why i often have big huge holes in my clothes and need to darn them up. these images are from the church of craft meeting last saturday in which i lackadaisically taught some genius students how to darn socks and sweaters and mittens. that's me up there, your bookish narrator! below are my chronically snagging (and much mended) slippers and adrienne's first stab at replacing a sock heel. thanks to reverend mother leah for taking pictures.

mending the rules.

today i had a couple friends over to help me with a project. after we were done, dusty (to whom i owe a million favours) presented me with one of his favorite sweaters complete with new moth bites for 2009. among this city's many recent insect scourges (bed bugs, fruit flies, wasps...), moths figure pretty heavily so i figure these pictures of my darning might be of greater general use.

of course, i am too tired to explain these images or write up a proper tutorial on sweater repair but the clever among you will be able to do some shrewd figuring-out.

dusty helped me with the pictures as we goofed around with some of the camera equipment i inherited from my pop. the macro extensions were particularly fun to play with. i am able to photograph single buttons with the shortest extension. i am sure i will find other applications now that i am over thinking i don't know how to use them.