On mending matters, and on wearing purple

I don’t really own a pair of (discarded) jeans that could be used as a quarry for my mending project of the one pair of blue jeans that I started mending where/when necessary. And my son isn’t really producing jeans (yet) that I could sneak from him when he outgrows them. So just a few weeks ago my friend Regine gave me a worn-out pair of jeans for this purpose, at the same time I made up my mind that the blue pair and a light-colored pair of trousers would be my only two mending projects in terms of pants.

 

I believe in wearing clothes for a long time, and I do enjoy the work of mending. However, my inner critic is very strong and when I look at people who publish books about mending (which don’t teach me anything new in terms of techniques or ideas, but I just never would think about publishing a book with that topic) I start thinking ... and comparing ... Usually my jeans/pants need mending in delicate places, due to excessive bike riding around town, and an attractively stylish patch on the thigh is not the regular mend I am faced with. 

Because of the wear and tear my pants are prone to suffer,
I have also decided that I would happily turn to mending
by machine whenever possible, to save time.

But about a week ago I realized that my well-loved pair of yellow jeans is indeed beginning to get to the state where it might need mending, too, and given the path of worldly things I can figure out that the red one may be getting there, too, in not too long a time. Both of these I don’t want to part with anytime soon. So I took a trip to the thrift store and was going to buy, if possible, a pair in yellow and a pair in red, for future reference as mending materials. After all, yellow has been fashionable lately, and who knows how long that will last, I figured it would be easy to find a pair right now. The color arrangement on the rack in the thrift store, however, was so alluring that I ended up with several more than I had intended. 

 

And I did resist several others which would have been a wonderful color addition to this palette, you have to believe me. I was short of time when I went in there and didn’t try any of them on until later at home. Only the black and the purple fit me, the yellow and red are meant to be cut up.  The others I will send to a charity organization in Hamburg that makes design clothes and accessoires from used denims and order a jacket made from them. If they make jacket on commission, the website does not state that, only accessoires - I have sent an enquiry.

When I was a lot younger than now I had a purple blazer, which I liked a lot. I wore it on the first day when I started teaching at the university. And it helped – an older professor was already teaching in the classroom that had been designated to me, and I had to stand my ground to defend my rights. Which was easier wearing a purple blazer, believe me. Unfortunately, that blazer disappeared somewhere along the way, I don’t have it anymore, which I deeply regret.  

Last year (or was it even two years ago?) I started a quilt on the poem Warning, more commonly known under its first line “when I am an old woman I shall wear purple...” by Jenny Joseph. I have had a red hat before, and worn it – but it, too, has disappeared. When I started the quilt – which has stalled a bit because I made a serious mistake and have not yet gathered new momentum to continue after I discovered that mistake – 

 

I had not been considering to be wearing purple any time soon. (When does being an old woman actually begin...?) 

Now this pair of purple jeans is waiting for me. Which will happen first – the completion of the quilt, or me wearing the purple jeans?

Re-Evaluating Brown

This week has seen the beginning of my dyeing activities for this month’s fabric selection. Because it has been an emotionally very intensive week with the refugee class, only two of the six colours have been dyed yet, none of them has been ironed … but I think it will be a nice colour selection. Which is a bit funny now, because this selection is one that I have been putting off for a while, at least since July, which was the first time I thought that it was about time for making another selection of browns. Not that there hasn’t been one done before, but it had been a while ago. It will be a combination of shades of different browns.

In my own stash, and in the colours I have on offer at the stand, I am never terribly well-stocked in shades of brown. I don’t like brown. Despite the fact that I used to have hair of a very dark and rich brown, and I have always liked my hair - it never led to a situation that would let me feel something like appreciation for the colour brown as such. Brown for me was always tainted, it was ‘the colour of the Nazis’. When I was still buying fabric in fabric stores I would always pass by the brown section. It just never occurred to me that one would want to buy a piece of brown fabric. I do have a brown leather jacket, and I have had that for many many years, but I bought it for the fact that it was less than half price, very large, and it just came at the right time. Never have I felt a particular appreciation for its colour.

When I started dyeing my own fabrics, this changed a little, and I learned to appreciate brown results of my own dyeing activites, especially when they had turned out not too uniform, but were rather displaying a bit of variation.

What I could appreciate about the beauty of hand-dyed browns was their hand-dyed characteristics, I was happy to sell them, and even strive to have an almost decent selection on offer. But I would still not have been very likely to try to actually use a shade of brown in a quilt unless I was forced to. Recent conversations with some of the students in class, talking about colours, preferences, and feelings associated with particular colours in their home countries, however, has given my unappreciative opinion about brown a bit of a shake-up. The pride of the West-Africans about their skin colour, the way they dress and are frequently very positive about brown has given me a new outlook on the possibilities of combining brown with other colours. I would probably still not (yet) use it much for any quilt for myself. But I could well imagine using it in special combinations with other colours, should somebody want that for themselves. It’s amazing how this little bit of teaching German as a foreign language is affecting my personal outlook on life, and obviously it is starting to take an influence on my art making as well. No matter how emotionally draining the refugees’ situation is, and how dispiriting my lack of power to take any influence in that can be - being in personal contact with this special group of people is probably much more enriching for me than I could ever give them back by telling them something about verb conjugations or passive constructions.