Repair again (and again)

Using patches and darning stiches to fix clothing has extended the life of several of my items.  But I get frustrated because these fixes do not last forever.  Sometimes they don't last long at all.

About a year ago, I patched the knees of my son's pants. I used material from old socks, ironed them onto lightweight interfacing and sewed them on the pants using a whip stitch around the outside and a series of running stitches down the length of the patch. 

This fix lasted a year. Last week my son fell and scraped up the knees of the pants and his own knees. Now there are new holes. I am not going to do anything further with this article of clothing because he is growing quickly and has nearly outgrown the pants.  

What happens to my own clothes has been somewhat more bothersome. Mending, especially by hand, takes time. Last summer I patched a pair of  comfortable pants using a home made patch and a series of running stitches. Just four or five months ago, I darned these socks.

When you are patching or darning, you create a strong series of fibers and stitches. The fabric you are mending may not be as strong as it used to be and often you will get more tearing along your outer stiches. 

Several weeks ago, I checked out the book Mending Life: A Handbook for Repairing Clothes and Hearts by Nina and Sonya Montenegro from the library.

Nina describes her first time mending a pair of pants. Within a month a new hole appeared.  As she sat down to mend again, she had all sorts of thoughts about whether it was worth the time and whether a new hole would appear, but she sewed on the second patch anyway. She writes:

A while late, another hole did appear, but this time I didn't hesitate to get out my mending tools and choose a new patch to add. I breathed deeply and thought of how similar the work was to collage - intuitively adding layers of color and shape to make a composition I would be wearing on my knee. In time, mending became a ritual for me, something I tucked into my backpack and took along everywhere to work on whenever I had a free moment.  Just like our grandma, I came to understand that there is always time to mend.

After reading that passage, I realized that I should not be annoyed if I had to continue to mend an item over time. I took the pants that had a second tear
and added another patch in a contrasting color. I will be able to wear them at least a little bit longer.   

Then as I was writing this, I took a break to redarn those socks. Again, they will last just a little bit longer.

 

Going back to the old fashioned handkerchief

Whenever I see giant packages of disposable products, I can't help but think of the John Muir quote: 

This is creation. All this is going on today, only men are blind to see it. They think only of food. They are not content to provide three meals a day; they must have enough for a thousand meals. And so they build ships to carry the food that they call commerce, and they build houses to store food in, and other houses to buy and sell it in, and houses to eat it in, and load themselves down with the care of it so that they cannot get away. They can not pause long enough to go out into the wilderness where God has provided every sparrow enough to eat and to spare, and contemplate for even an hour the wonderful world that they live in.

Over the past 70 years, the size of the American house has doubled.  While more serious thinkers may have other theories about why this is, one of mine is that we need more space to store giant packages of stuff that we are going to use once and throw away. Then, bigger houses lead to more land use, more energy use and more driving because of the lower density of neighborhoods.

One of the most important reasons for reuse and repurposing is to use resources in a sustainable way. However, it does also have the advantage of taking less space (as long as you don't hang on to things you truly don't use).  Because we cut up old clothes and fabric scraps into rags that can be washed, we only store one extra roll of paper towel at at time.  We use cloth napkins so we don't store a lot of those either. 

Last year, I also started using old fashioned handkerchiefs for use at home (we are in the  middle of a pandemic so I get why we use paper products in public spaces). Tissue paper has been the mode of choice for blowing one's nose for most of my life, but we always brought handkerchiefs as gifts when we went to India in the 1970s and 1980s.   

I made some out of an old bed sheet.  Besides taking less space than boxes of tissue, one of biggest advantages of handkerchief is that they don't make a complete mess in the wash when you accidentally leave one in your pocket!

 

Garden trellis made of sticks

We had a week of unseasonably warm weather here in Minnesota, with temperatures topping 80 degrees Fahrenheit last Monday. While I moderated a conference session on the impacts of climate change last week and I know that this weather part of warming trends, I enjoyed it thoroughly. In preparation for growing season, I moved my upcycling outside.

As you know from my previous post on winter sowing, I am hoping to soon be planting peas. I could have purchased trellises, but I decided to make mine with found objects, namely sticks. I made one branch trellis last year so I had some experience under my belt.

In the weeks before, I had been collecting sticks during my daily walks.  During these walks, a few dogs looked at me longingly as I walked by with a stick. I felt bad in one instance and gave up my finds to the neighbor's dog. 

When I constructed last year's trellis, I tried various ways of attaching the sticks - nails, screws and rope. I landed on lashing as the most effective method and decided to use that exclusively on this trellis. I used a mixture of fabric strips and string to lash.

I started by trimming the smaller branches from the sticks that were going to be my vertical posts and laid them down. I then used fabric strips to tie together the first two sticks. I then attached the horizontal stick to a few more vertical ones. I used a garden stake to line up the ends of the sticks to ensure a level bottom. 

I kept adding sticks to crosswise until the trellis was stable enough to lean up against the wall of the house.  It is easier to work on the structure when it is upright.  

I continued to add sticks until the trellis was the size I wanted. Then I moved it to where I was going to plant the peas. I  tied the trellis to the fence so it wouldn't flop over onto an unsuspecting pedestrian.  Can't wait until the peas are ready to plant!

Behavior change is hard - trying to consume less electricity

Last year we had solar panels installed on our garage. They started producing energy in August. The solar company estimated the panels would cover 80% of our electricity needs. 

Over the course of a year, we would like the panels to cover all of our electricity needs. We don't have batteries so for us this means simply using as much as we generate.  We only have so much room on the roof so we couldn't install more panels. Our challenge is to reduce the amount we consume. 

With our solar panels, comes a system that provides minute-by-minute updates on electricity consumption and generation. If you don't have solar panels, there are devices you can purchase to monitor consumption in real time. It has been interesting to watch what takes up the most energy. So far, the winner of that contest is our clothes dryer. We assume later in the summer the air conditioner will take up a significant amount of  energy, but we haven't really used it since the panels started operating.  This is a screen shot of our energy consumption today. After noon and around 8 p.m. you can see high rates of consumption.  We were running the clothes dryer at these two times (plus at the later time, my kid took a shower so our electric hot water heater was going too).  

We live in a place that is quite cold in the winter.  I have seasonal allergies to so I am reluctant to hang things like sheets outside to dry during the warmer months.  We will probably continue to use the dryer, but we have started to make a concerted effort to do less laundry.  We noticed that we have been washing a lot of bath towels. Three people should not be sending 11 towels to the laundry in a week.  In order to help us, I made little badges from denim leftover from my garden apron project  with the initials of our first names on them. I binder clipped them on to each of our towels. I did this with our table napkins too, but that was less about laundry than about the fact that the napkins were getting mixed up and we were losing them. 

On the day last week when we started the new system, I gathered up all the towels in the bathroom and put them in the laundry. Then I took out a clean towel for each of us and hung them up.  A few hours later my spouse informed me he kept two towels on the back of his door because he needed a second towel for his hair (he has much shorter hair them me).  On the first night of the new system, my kid told me had used the new system and used the towel with his initial on it.  On the second and third nights, he forgot and took out new towels from the basket.  So I put this sign on  our towel basket. 

We put the two extra towels he used aside to use the next week. We managed to do only

 three loads of laundry this weekend including bed sheets, but we are still struggling with the towels. I just went into the bathroom and found a fourth towel that had no tag on it and that was wet. There are two possible culprits and since I haven't yet taken my shower today, it wasn't me. Let's hope it works better next week.