Mending

Crafting and blogging don't pay the bills, so I have a job as an educator for a local school district.  Unfortunately, this coming year will be a challenging one.  I won't bore you with the politics going on in Wisconsin, but the end result is that my take-home pay has been sliced.  Badly.  And as the sole breadwinner in this family (my husband is a stay-at-home dad, another great occupation that doesn't pay bills) it's been causing me a lot of stress.  So I've been looking at ways to save money.

Unfortunately, over the past several months my son has developed the habit of chewing on the collars of his shirts.  His pediatrician and his dentist both have no idea why this is.  It seems to be an absent-minded habit at this point.  I started putting spray on his collars to deter him with a bad taste, but it was too late.  The necklines of several of his t-shirts had holes.  After taking a good hard look at his shirts, and a good hard look at my bank account, I decided to mend them instead of replacing half of his summer wardrobe.

I don't know how to mend...I actually had to look it up on YouTube.  It wasn't too tough, and now I'm pretty decent at it.  I worked my way through a small stack of his t-shirts this afternoon.  This was one of my first attempts.

Not perfect, but not too bad.  I think it'll be pretty inconspicuous on a moving five-year-old.  I also mended a dress of my daughter's...she got a hold of a pair of scissors and decided to "make a pocket." 

I also shortened the sleeves on one of my son's long sleeved t-shirts...his kindergarten class was painting one day and he got paint all over his sleeves.  It absolutely wouldn't wash off.  Why on earth would you give four and five-year-olds non-washable paint?  Anyway, my Singer 27 did a great job, as always.  I'm always a little surprised when I find it can sew a type of fabric that didn't exist in 1901 when it was manufactured.  But it actually did a better job than my modern machine did the last time I tried to sew knit.

I need to finish my mom's Carpenters Wheel quilt, but I'm itching to start a paper-pieced Mariner's Compass...I want a Mariner's Compass mini-quilt, and I already know just where I'll hang it.  I hope I can finish both soon!