I am giving myself a 75% on successfully completing this one. After committing to the challenge, I realized I lacked even the most basic equipment to make it happen. Yes, I really and truly did not own a needle and thread. How embarrassing!
I finally made it to the fabric store on Sunday, and was honestly a little intimated. I am so out of my comfort zone in this area, and I didn’t even know what I was looking for. But I sucked it up and drove to the cute little independent sewing shop about half a mile from my house, Treadle Yard Goods. I’ve passed it probably a hundred times and have never gone in.
Boy, am I glad that I did! The women working there were super helpful, and were it not for them, I definitely would have bought the wrong stuff. For my socks, they recommended embroidery thread, which is what I used to buy to make friendship bracelets as a kid (those were the days!). For my jeans, she warned me that it may be a lost cause due to the extremely stretchy fabric, but directed me toward the proper iron-on patches and thread to give it a shot.
$11 and a signup for their email newsletter later, and I was off. I got home and worked on my socks first, using the tutorial I found. The result was nothing short of amazing. Seriously; it was so rewarding to sew the thread back and forth across the hole, and with one swift tug, voila! The hole was gone. The other sock had an identical hole, and I closed it up like the seasoned pro I had become in the previous five minutes.
Next, my jeans. They are stretching at the seams of both back pockets, making it pretty uncouth to wear them out of the house. I did as the shop keeper instructed and cut thin strips out of the iron-on patches, then ironed them onto the inside of my jeans.
I was instructed to next sew through the pants and the patches together and see what happens. I did not get to that step yet, but tried the jeans on and could tell the patches are not going to stay put on their own. So I will give that a shot when I have a free moment and see if they survive a day of wear. If it doesn’t work, they will become my “house jeans” until they fully bust.
With this challenge under my belt, I am excited to darn some more socks for myself and my family members. And now that I’m on the sewing shop’s email list, maybe I’ll even sign up for a class!
Climate 52 