I own a mustard yellow and green dress made of linen. It's a unique design and I like to wear it in the spring and summer. Of course, a couple years ago I managed to get three ink stains on the chest area where someone couldn't help but notice. I washed the dress at home using various methods of removing stains. None of them worked. I took it to the dry cleaners and they couldn't remove the stains either. Then the dress sat there in my closet, but I really didn't want to get rid of it.
Then I came across the article on visible mending I mentioned in my first blog post. I became slightly obsessed with visible meaning, reading everything I could cough up on the internet. Then I realized what I could with that dress that had been sitting in my closet. I knew how to embroider daisies when I was seven. I should be able to do it again in my forties.
I went to the local fabric store and stared at the various skeins of embroidery floss until I found one that matched with the color scheme. I also bought an embroidery hoop. And then I Googled how to embroider daisy chains because, in the forty years between 2019 and when I learned to embroider, I had forgotten. I stitched over the stains and added more design elements. In the end the embroidery looked as if it had meant to be there.
My skills today are a bit better than they were in 2019. If I had to do it over again, I would have added a stabilizer to the fabric such as a light interfacing or some other lightweight fabric. However, even with my imperfect stitching, I could wear the dress again and I extended the use of the dress by a season or two. What if we all did this with our clothes?
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