Mending a towel

Sewing is an imminently practical art form. It allows you to fix what you have and make what you want to your specifications. This is the first of two posts about what you can do with a towel that is starting to show wear. These projects are both simple, perfect if you are just starting to sew with a machine. And most of us will have material to work with. 

Towels often wear out first around the edges. Often when this happens, the rest of the towel is still in pretty good condition. You can fix the towel fairly quickly and easily.

This is the beach towel I mended today. You can sees strings hanging off and the frayed edges.

 

I started this project by using a seam ripper to take out the edging that was still intact. I then trimmed off the fraying part with a rotary cutter. You could use scissors as well. 

Then I took the towel to my sewing machine and sewed a zig zag stitch up both sides of the towel, backstitching at the ends so the stitching does not unravel.  This towel didn't have any holes in them, but on other towels I just worked a zig zag stich back and forth over the hole to patch it up. 

I have done this with several towels in the last couple years. There will be some fraying at the edges until it reaches the zig zag stitch, but the stitch will prevent it from fraying more and will allow you to use the towel for a few more years. 

Sourcing fabric for upcycling - or how I ended up with a 38-pound box of it

In order to upcycle fabric, you have to have fabric to work with. What I have discovered over the last year is that there is more than enough fabric in the world to upcycle. 

I started my upcycling quest with fabric I had laying around - old clothes, socks with holes and linens from my parents house. Then I made my first ask on the neighborhood sell/barter/trade Facebook page.  At that point, I was looking for some fabric to make colorful patches to use in mending.  wo neighbors obliged with a couple bags of scraps.  

I had wanted to make a braided rug for decades and sometime last winter I  decided to host a fundraiser for Saint Paul Youth Services.  The plan was to have a house party in May 2020 where I "sold" things that I had to made to encourage zero waste practices and to support this racial justice organization.  In order to purchase supplies for both projects,  I went to a Goodwill Outlet to buy t-shirts to cut into strips for the rug and fabric to make bags for zero waste kits to take to the coffee shop or restaurant.  

I made several kits with thrifted silverware and a mason jar mag. Of course I never hosted that fundraiser and you can't bring your own mug most places nowadays so those kits are sitting there until we are all vaccinated. 

Then I started looking on Facebook Marketplace for fabric that people were selling, I bought a lot of upholstery fabric pieces. Now my neighbors are offering me fabric without my asking. I have taken some like some like some old jeans and have had to turn down some offers.

I received the mother lode of all fabric lots a few weeks ago. Many of the Goodwill organizations in the United States offer items through online auctions.  I bid on a few fabric lots, but I was always outbid. then of course I bid something like $35 on a 38-pound lot of patterned fabric and I was the high bidder.  A few weeks later the box arrived. 

The above my picture is my guest room right now. It is going to take me awhile to use all that fabric!   

Upcycling the upcycling

Working on sewing projects inevitably results in fabric scraps. Upcycling often results in more scraps than virgin fabric because pre-made clothes have features like seams or screen printing that aren't easy to use in other projects. That means I need to upcycle my upcycling!

In the old days people used to save fabric scraps to stuff pillows. However, I have gotten used to modern pillows with fiberfill and don't particularly like to lay on lumps. Using finely shredded fabric would solve that problem, but you can't shred fabric in a home paper cutter and they don't make home fabric shredders. The cheapest industrial one I found online was $5,000.  There are textile shredding services, but they tend to serve customers bigger than just me. 

I live in a cold climate so I have been using these scraps to stuff "draft dodgers" that go at the bottom of exterior doors to stop cold air from coming in.  I took the idea from a member who posted about uses for fabric scraps on one of the Facebook pages associated with Zero Waste Saint Paul.

Making a draft dodger is an easy sewing exercise. In it's simplest form, you cut a rectangle of fabric about 10 inches high and the length of your door and frame (generally 35 to 45 inches) long. You fold the rectangle in half, right sides together.  Then you stitch a seam on the long edge to make a tube. I leave both the short seams unsewn. You then turn it inside out and stuff. 

The scraps need to be small enough to not get into a tangled mess. I have found it easier to stuff from both ends since the tubes tend to be pretty long. I use a rubber band on the end I am not stuffing so the material doesn't fall out. Then I sew up the ends. While I use a sewing machine, it would be easy enough to hand sew one. 

This winter I made at least a dozen draft dodgers for a donation to a wonderful organization I serve on the board of, Saint Paul Youth Services.  

I made my draft dodgers a little fancier than what I described above because I was using them to teach myself new sewing skills. So mine featured applique, piecework, pintucks and ruffles.

Here are some examples. 

Why upcycling is my art form

I have always had a need to physically create things. Over the years I have cycled through different arts and crafts. I landed on cooking as one of my art forms - it is useful and doesn't lend itself to having a pile of unfinished projects (a weakness of mine). More recently I have added sewing to my repertoire. 

A more typical way of approaching sewing is to first decide what you are going to make, then second to purchase a pattern or an online tutorial, and last purchase the fabric and other supplies you need. While sometimes I go that route, I often take a different approach. I wait until materials (often used or new materials people don't want ) come into my life and then I decide what I am going to make. 

I have chosen to do this for many reasons and one of them is that we are extracting resources at a rate that is simply not sustainable.  We use items for short periods of time and then we are done with them. 

This video The Story of Stuff addresses our linear production model and the model's true costs. The model has resulted in environmental degradation, unsafe and unfair working conditions and oodles of stuff we have to dispose of in some way and that way is always problematic.  

That is why I upcycle. 

 

Fixing my socks

During the pandemic I came to face my large pile of mismatched, random and holey socks. I decided to refrain from buying new socks for a while and use what I have. I haven't been going anywhere so I figured it was fine to wear mismatched and visibly mended socks.  And when I have to dress professionally again, I can continue to wear most of my mended socks because most of them are black and the repair is on the bottom of the sock.

Hand darning is a technique used to fill holes in clothes or linens. Basically you are weaving more cloth where it has ripped or worn down. You only need a few things to hand darn -  needle, thread (I use embroidery floss. You can also buy wool thread made specifically for darning) and scissors. It is also helpful to have an object under the hole like my Easter darning egg. When I darned my kid's pants, I used a flat Lego so I wouldn't catch the fabric on the other side! Beeswax can also help stiffen thread to make it easier to thread the needle and make the thread less likely to tangle. 

Most of my embroidery floss is composed of six strands. For cotton sock darning, I usually split the floss and use three strands. The first step in darning is to stich around the hole to reinforce the edges. If you are darning socks, you will not want to put a knot in the thread, but rather tuck the loose end into other threads. It is not comfortable to step on knots. The next step is to create long stiches with a very short in a perpendicular stich to keep the lines parallel. These stitches become the warp threads. 

Once these threads are in place, you make a small stitch to the place you can begin start weaving over and under making weft threads. When you finish one end, you put in a small perpendicular stitch and go back in the opposite direction.  You can find more details on how to darn on the Collette blog. 

Finish off the thread ends by going weaving the end into the work you have done. And then continue to wear your socks!

Darning and my darning egg

When I started my quest to save fabric I started with darning. And it's a good place for you to start if you are looking to mend clothing and linens rather than throwing them away.  In my view, fixing things is a forgotten skill in our age. 

You can darn by hand or darn by machine. Darning by hand requires very little equipment and minimal skills. You need embroidery floss, an embroidery needle, scissors and a darning egg, which will help you keep the shape of the item and keep you from catching the other side of the fabric if you are mending something tubular like a sock or the knee of kid pants. 

Because I try to use what is around, my darning egg is not one specifically designed for sewing.  My darning egg is a large green plastic Easter egg that I picked up at a junk swap at my workplace. 

You can make your darning more or less noticeable depending on whether you want visible mending or invisible mending. 

Here is one example of a sock I darned by hand using a contrasting embroidery floss.  

Here is an example of towel I mended using a sewing machine. This is less noticeable and happily I extended the life of this towel by 18 months and counting. 

I will share more information in an upcoming post on how to utilize these techniques, but I want you to first know that we can all fix things rather than throwing them away.