Paying dearly.

 The past few days I have spent a lot of time on our terrace, either resting (sometimes reading) in the hammock, or sitting in the shade of the magnolia tree, spinning along with the Tour de Fleece/France. I look like I have been on holiday and not like I have been recuperating. I actually did get quite a bit of spinning done, it's not even the second day of rest on the tour 

 

Sometimes I have the live reporting on the tablet on,
but most of the time I don't bother as I am not really
interested in the biking event. I just like the spinning event.

and I have spun far more than half of the whole batch of fibers I started out with, and at that point I wasn't expecting to get much done. My goal when I set out was 'spin a little bit every day'.

The cough is slowly getting easier, but thanks to my kind of job I had the 'pleasure' of being subjected to a second pcr test, after five days of quarantine, which was still positive. So I get to stay home a few more days. What a perfect way to start a new job! My boss is going to love it....

Personally, I think it is completely right to be tested again, but current German regulations are different for 'just anybody' and for people working in health care jobs, and that really upsets me. There must be many more people out there who are still positive after 5 days of quarantine, and they just get to leave the house, return to their normal life - thus endangering everybody whom they meet on the street, because mask wearing is not mandatory anymore either. Health care workers, however, get tested a second time, have to stay home longer - and when back at their job, they face the danger that all the other people are posing form them while doing their job. I don't think this is fair. And it certainly can't be what health experts would recommend. But... I wasn't involved in any of these decisions. I know I would not be good out there working all day in my current state, but I feel so much better that I can take the active decision to enjoy these unfairly allotted free days. Of course, there is still more spinning waiting for me, but it won't be the only fiber activity I will turn to.

Spinning a fiber sample pack from Ashford, using all the
colors that are still in the box according to a pre-determined
time scheme, two threads will be from this pack, a third
thread to neutralize will be gray with some silk carded
in to soften the original merino. In the end I will have A LOT of
this yarn...

 

As a little treat to myself, at the beginning of my quarantine I gave in to a craving I had felt for a little while. On Instagram I follow @visible_creative_mending, and for a while I had been considering getting her book on techniques of meding. Of course, I know how to mend, dating back to my grandmother's teaching and my mother's book of handicrafts from way back then (the first edition came out in 1930, although my mother's copy is from 1954 - perhaps it would be an interesting topic for a research paper how that book changed during its lifespan from the beginning through the years of Nazi-regime in Germany, and how it was used to influence girls' lives... but that is just a thought on the side, and I would rather just make and stitch instead of following up on it).

 

I also have Rodabaugh's book which I bookreviewed for the Guild's magazine a few years ago. 

 

And I have been showing some of the mends I do, so this was a mere fancy to treat myself during illness. As a matter of fact, I had been through the first steps of ordering in the online shop, up to the moment when shipping costs came up and I was confronted with another of those unpleasant side effects of Brexit. For one thing, a price of £28,00 is, I think, quite costly for a book like this. But add to that another £ 11 for shipping... at first, I balked at that and was sensible and told myself 'that is quite a lot of money for something you basically know how to do', and refrained. But, with illness messing up my thinking I did go ahead and order it.

 

Yesterday it arrived. Not only is it small-ish, definitely small for a price like that, but German post has once again given me the pleasure of 'treating it through customs' (worth €3.45), and for the 'lending' of this the postal service adds a service fee of €6,37 or something like that. So I had to pay an almost extra €10 to even lay hand on this... I do call that paying dearly for a lack of resistance to temptation. 

It looks like a nice enough book, but definitely not worth that much. Hopefully I will be more careful before ever ordering anything again that will arrive from outside EU borders.

On and on and on...

The numbers of infection are at an all-time high here now. And still rising. Last year we were talking about the 35/50 limits where severe measures would be put into place, in the spring it was 100, now we have surpassed the 1,000 and the incoming government with the newly elected parliament have put 'an end' to the 'pandemic situation' that used to be mentioned in the law. It makes you wonder whether they are completely out of their mind, or what is happening here? I am very grateful I received my third shot yesterday a week ago, because by now I have been transferred to working (helping out) on ICU, and believe me, that is absolutely no fun at all. Every single case who needs intensive care in our hospital has not been vaccinated. And I ask myself where did these people live for the past 2 years? Everybody could have been vaccinated by now, the predictions of what would come if this did not happen before this winter were out there - and still people think their 'right to decide' and their 'right to physical integrity' counted higher than their duty to contribute to the entire society's physical integrity by helping to break this virus' spread? I am so disappointed with my fellow Germans, it is beyond words. Especially now that I am working in the hospital, having to risk my physical integrity and health by taking care of these egotists and dealing with their stupidity. I am MAD. So so so so mad... And now there are reports about the yet again new and more infectious variant of the virus. That is completely disheartening.

Right now, I don't know whether it will be possible to go for my little four day vacation I had planned at the beginning of December, and for which I have booked a holiday apartment. We are supposedly facing a lockdown for unvaccinated persons, but I don't know yet how far restrictions will apply to people who have been vaccinated yet. Will they allow private tourist travel, or will that be forbidden? Will my 16-yr-old once again have to stay home, no basketball practice, but be forced to go to school? I think he is perfectly right when he says his 'social life' doesn't happen on school grounds, he wants to go to basketball practice. And why should professional soccer players be allowed to 'play', but the young people not? 

I woke up with a sore throat and a headache this morning and as we are supposed to stay at home from work with symptoms of a cold, I did that. A test was negative, which is a relief, after all I have been assigned to the ICU for the past two weeks and, althought the 'outside' relief personnel is usually the person who makes sure that personnel 'in' the cubicles with Covid patients has all the material and medication they need without having to leave the isolation room, of course that means that I am exposed to the overall environment, and in some cases I did have to dress up in all the protective gear and assist a colleague with handling of immobile, artificially respirated and/or sedated patients.

But as I got to stay home, I was able to make the most of my good intentions I had announced on my instagram account two days ago. I had planned to not spend money on the so-called 'Black Friday' on some supposedly sale item, but to dedicated my time to continue mending one of my mending projects, the light pair of pants. It had been sitting on my table, biding its time in a state of neglect since some time in the late summer.

So I took this mending project to bed and between sleeping a little and resting I got a heap of stitching done. 

The piece of fabric I am attaching here is an older piece of linen, not exactly the same quality as the pants, but I like the look of it. It is rather big, too, not only a small mend.

I went down the entire piece of linen, and then started circling around in one direction, then the other, to slightly secure the fraying edges.

And then, because I found myself in a kind of flow, I just went ahead and started on the next patch.

So Mending Friday instead of spending Friday was a good day for these pants. This is how they look from the front now.

And this is the back side.

I wouldn't exactly say they're beautiful. But they are a statement, and I will proudly wear them this coming summer, and many more.

And in the evening I went down into the basement and brought up our choir and orchestra of angels to start the Christmas decoration.

Unfortunately, no Christmas markets this year, again, so we won't be adding a new member. But it is reassuring to see these little fellows on our window sill. If I feel well again tomorrow, I will start on Christmas cookies tomorrow. Traditions are soothing, perhaps they will help tie me over this oncoming next wave of virus...

The Matters of Mending: self-experiment part 3

Before the publication of the book review in the magazine of the German Patchwork Guild in the middle of June I want to show the third part of my self-experiment in the spirit of Katrina Rodabaugh's book 'Mending Matters'. Again, it is a mend of a pair of pants in the much-stressed area between the upper thighs. Somehow that is the only area (so far) where my pants need mending. But don't worry, after this instalment I will not show any more repairs of that particular area, if I decide to show other mending activities of mine they will be slightly more original or on other types of garments.
So one of my favorite pair of jeans was worn through on both sides of the upper inner thighs, and I had been saving it ever since I saw the announcement of Rodabaugh's books because I was planning to use it as a test items.

Different from the light colored pair of pants earlier I decided that this challenge could not be met through a patch from the inside. Instead, I chose Katrina's 'outside patch'. Edges were fold-ironed before stitching them over the threadbare area.

With the first patch, I chose a grey thread and first stitched all around the circumference of the patch before filling it up.

For the second patch I decided to be bit more daring in terms of color and used a red thread instead.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to take a picture yet of what it looks like when I am wearing the jeans and I don't want to ask my son to do it ... but I hope there will be a chance to find somebody who will do that for me. Because I am curious myself how much of the mend will be visible.

There are still more mending issues on a stack that need to be tackled in the near future, for example the light trousers I started out with definitely need more work in other places. And the whole thing will be a further process of learning. But I do agree with Katrina Rodabaugh that it is a kind of state of mind to be doing that.
I can't really say how long the life span of my clothes will be extended through this. I don't usually 'wear through' anything but these areas of pants, and yet I usually wear my clothes for many years. And if I do give them away, which does not happen often, I give them to a second hand store, so keeping them out of landfill is not one of the issues why I would be mending. Mending has not been a necessity, but it certainly is an interesting addition to my range of textile activity. I had had the idea of mending visibly myself, before ever hearing of Katrina Rodabaugh or any of the 'sustainable fashion' people, or slow sewists or mindful menders or whatever name, and if you can sew basic stitches it might now be necessary to buy Katrina's book purely for the techniques of mending. But it certainly holds a wide range of ideas if you feel uncertain about how to go along, and it would be a great gift for a textile friend!

The Matters of Mending - self-experiment, part 2

When I went on vacation early April, I took a bit of work with me. For one thing, I had to finish the article on and translation of one chapter from Katrina Rodabaugh’s book “Mending Matters”,

which will be published in the German Patchwork Guild’s magazine in June. As I had started before,

I wanted to do a few sample/self experiments before the publication in the magazine (although not before it was being sent off to the editor…), so I also packed two pairs of pants that desperately needed mending, this time my own. 

The one I started with was a light colored pair in jeans style, which I have had for several years. And, although I would never have called it a ‘favorite’ pair of pants of mine, obviously I had worn it enough to get it to the point where it was thinning in seriously important places (i.e. interior upper thighs). They hadn’t been worn through entirely, but it was getting dangerously thin. And some fraying at the back of the seam of the right leg, and a bit of a hole on the inside of the bottom leg.

Basically my thoughts behind taking this pair of pants to be an object for my self-experiment were that, because I did not consider these pants anything like a favorite, it wouldn’t hurt terribly if the mending didn’t turn out right, or did not feel good wearing them after mended. Now I know, a big part of Katrina’s philosophy is to not throw clothes away, and I wasn’t planning to do so, since of course I was expecting this to be a very successful experiment. But if it hadn’t turned out totally successful, the tears on my side wouldn’t have been flowing for very long.

So I started on the frayed backside seam and - for lack of sashiko thread, which Katrina uses -  stitched over that with one of my hand-dyed threads from when I was still dyeing threads with the fabric club.

Then I went on to fix the small hole on the inside of the leg, and that turned out nicely indeed.

First I stitched a piece of light-weight linen onto the inside of the leg.

Then I flipped the extending part of the linen to the outside, affixed it and...

then the sides of the mending fabric were secured with buttonhole stitch.

And then I took up the challenge of the thinning place on one side of the upper thighs. Of course, I had not really brought the exact right fabric to use. That linen I was using for the hole was a scrap I found in the box for "A Scrap a Day", that I was also working on during those days. So I cut up a longish strip of linen and placed three pieces of it next to each other on the inside.

Then I stitched them in both directions, first in one direction, then perpendicular to the first direction, and it turned out like this.

 

One direction only, on the inside.

One direction only on the outside.

Two directions done, on the outside.

Can't take a picture of myself from behind, so I don't know how much you actually see of the mend.It is a rather large area indeed, and basically the whole pair of pants needs reinforcement. So it is a question of dedication in terms of how much time does one want to put into a single pair of pants to prolong its lifetime... I guess I just will keep working on this one as long as it takes.

Stitching the mending fabric into the leg from the inside was a bit of a nuisance, having to turn the whole piece, trying not to prick oneself  with the pins that were keeping everything in place etc. But overall it worked well, and when I tried it on it seemed to fit alright. And the next day, when I wore it, it felt quite alright. So I figured I would probably go ahead and mend the other leg back home a few days later, too, when I had more fabric at hand that was of the correct weight.

The Matters of Mending - a Self Experiment

Mending Clothes has become fashionable (again). Books are being published on the topic, and Sustainable Wardrobe, thrifting, slow fashion have become words that are being used a lot now. For the German Patchwork Guild's magazine I am writing a book review of Katrina Rodabaugh's book "Mending Matters" (to appear in the June edition of the magazine), and we will be featuring her as a maker and artful mender in the magazine as well.

Not that I had not ever mended a piece of clothing before, and I have written about little bits of mending before. But I wanted to run a sort of self-experiment based on this book as material of guidance before I started writing the review.
Luckily - for this purpose - one of the refugees happened to come along with a severe rip in one of his two pairs of jeans and asked whether that could be mended.

Under normal circumstances I might just have said, 'hey, let's go and buy a new pair' as they don't own much anyway and there is always bound to be a sale somewhere where you can pick up a pair of jeans for a good price. But this was a gift from somewhere and I asked him whether he would let me mend it for him, and might it be a bit crazier than he thought. Still thinking I could go and buy that new pair afterwards as well if he decided he was not pleased with my work.
So I studied closely what Katrina Rodabaugh lists as necessities, and started following her steps.

Preparing the patch to be added on the inside.
I disobeyed Katrina's rules in this one because I did not have any leftover
denim that I could use as 'same weight' fabric for the patch. This is just a
lighter piece of fabric in an almost similar color.

First stitches attaching the patch on the inside of the rip. Of course, the rip
occurred in a place that was not exactly easy to get to. Given the unfavorable
location and handling, however, I claim I did pretty well: no folds or other mishaps.

View from the inside at the same point in time: the patch had been attached as
such on the outside, then the interior areas are being filled with mostly running
stitch.

Apart from the fact that the tips of my fingers started complaining at some point due to lack of sufficient practice and roughening with this kind of fabric, it was an easy mend.

The whole patch area has been filled with running stitch. If it had been a mend
for myself I might have chosen red thread, buth I did not dare go so noticeable
with a pair of pants that wasn't mine.

Some additional stitches to fasten the edges of the rip and enforce the area of the
patch that turned out visible in the rip.

Completed mend.

I liked it, but when I returned it to the owner I was a bit shy about his reaction to expect - I had told him it might be a bit of a noticeable mend, but of course he would not have know how far I would or could go. He trusts me, though, and said it was fine, and let me take a photo of the finished piece as he was wearing it.

Meanwhile I have gone to a local thrift store and bought a pair of jeans there in order to use that as a denim source. Neither my husband nor my son wear jeans, so there are no thriftable old pairs in the house when I want to start mending mine differently from ironing glue-on-patches onto the worn areas. Of course, with my jeans the first place to give up is the upper thigh area where the pants experience the most wear when riding the bike, which I do a lot in my everyday activities. The bike is my prime means of transportation in town.
The problem with my current favorite jeans, is, of course, that it got worn a lot, and that I did not start mending BEFORE the thin area broke. So now I have challenge ahead of me. Stay tuned - how much I will use of Katrina's techniques and add on to them with my own ideas, I don't know yet. But it is bound to happen sometime soon.