Last week my husband and I both caught a nasty cold. I fought valiantly* against it until Friday, when I finally called out sick for a day because my fuzzy-head, achy eyes (thanks sinus congestion!) and general fatigue meant I wasn’t going to be much good at work. We also had a slow weekend, and the low point was Sunday until mid-afternoon when I had a slitting headache (again – thank you sinuses).
All of this is to say, I didn’t get as much done over the past few days as I’d like. Achy eyes in particular meant that I was limited in how much junk tv I could watch, or even knitting I could get done. Most aggravating.
But thankfully, I am definitely on the mend now. And even felt sufficiently improved by late yesterday afternoon that I actually made progress on my mending goal.
Exhibit A: I fixed the tie on one of my favorite sun dresses. The side seam came undone last May at a wedding rehearsal picnic and it’s been sitting in my mend pile since:
I did this by hand, not on the machine, though it would have been easy enough either way. I chose hand stitching simply because the machine wouldn’t save any time, since it would need setting up, winding a bobbin with black thread, etc… Add to that the fact that it’s noisy and I was just getting over a nasty headache – definitely a quick hand stitch job instead.
Exhibit B: Fixing the closure on my black wrap skirt. This is a wool skirt with a subtle brown pin-stripe which I stitched entirely by hand over a decade ago while living in France as an English teaching assistant. It’s starting to show a little wear along the sides and back, but is generally still in good shape.
This one had a few things to fix and had been waiting for attention since I washed it in November. The metal side closure on the inside right was starting to come loose and needed to be stitched down again. The frog closure, which I made myself using my lucet to make the cord, was also starting to come off on one side and needed restitching. Lastly, I have to remove the fresh-water pearl decoration each time I wash it, and they needed to be sewn back on.
This last isn’t as much of a pain as you might think. A high quality worsted wool doesn’t need washing all that frequently since the wool and tight weave are dirt-repelling. The pearls just need to be quickly stitched down enough that they don’t fall off since they don’t take any strain.
If you are sitting reading this and thinking “huh – those don’t seem that hard. Why is this a goal for the month?” Well, that is precisely the point. These are simple fixes which I keep forgetting to do. It is utterly ridiculous that the sundress went unworn all last summer over that stupid tie, but there you have it. I’m slow to reach for the mending.
I also have a couple trickier/larger mending projects to tackle, but yesterday was not the day to start those. Instead, I chose two quick but practical ones to fix and managed to reduce the pile despite illness.
*By which I mean, tried to ignore the signs of a cold. I am not, and never have been, very graceful about being sick. I have an extremely limited capacity for napping, so when I can’t get stuff done, my good humor deteriorates rapidly. I am grouchy, unpleasant and ill-tempered. Thus, I pretend not to be sick as long as I can. I consider it a major accomplishment that AwesomeE wasn’t subjected to multiple reports per day on how grumpy I was at being sick this time around.