Friday, post 3

The end of another day. I have now done 15/26 items on the list.

It sounds like great progress, though tomorrow will be spent mostly on social commitments, and I haven’t yet started the behemoth on the list.

This is rug I bought many months ago when I desperately needed warmth. Though I wasn’t a big fan of the drab brown stripes, eventually I came up with a plan to use all my short yarn scraps to slowly make the stripes more colourful. I’ll show you more of that at a later date, but for now all I really wanted to get done was to fix the big ugly hole in it.

 First I cut all the threads around the hole, and stitched around the edges in a similar colour. Using an embroidery hoop to give it some tension I began to weave various colours to fill in the gap.

The random colours and woven stitch suits the rest of my stripes well.

Next was part of the green dying I did yesterday. This is an op shop skirt, with pockets, a thick waistband, and some pleats. Turns out I forgot to take a ‘before’ photo, but just imagine this with a white background and a lot more drab. The waistband was a little larger than I’d like, but the best way I could think of to correct this would take some major reconstruction. Instead I decided to hammer in some eyelets so I could lace up the back. Now it can be worn however I like it.

Finally, this is not a project I have finished yet, but I’m rather proud of tonight’s innovation. I want a flower type thing to put in my hair, something bright and a bit costumey. Below are the remnants of a silk skirt hem I took up. I just love this fabric, but haven’t found something worthy to use it for yet.

Unfortunately, as you can see, being a hem means that these pieces have been very heavily ironed, and it turns out we don’t have an iron (not one that I could find anyway), but hand sewing small petals with fabric in this condition would be a waste of time.

I had a think. My usual solution is to weigh stuff under books to flatten it, but that wouldn’t be fast enough to start sewing tonight. Something hot would be needed. Then I had the brilliant idea of just pouring boiling water over the fabric, while it was sitting on a flat smooth surface like the kitchen bench.

It worked perfectly! This isn’t something that would work for ironing your work shirts, but what do I care about your real world problems?

What you can’t see in the above photo is the steam coming off the fabric.