Category Archives: Trends

Mending is Trending

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Do you have a pair of pants that are past pretending to be cool with all their holes? Shirts with stains? ( I seem to have a lot of these, I can’t seem to keep my food in my mouth. Kids, this is something they don’t tell you about aging. You constantly have your food on your shirt. Yes, it’s gross. You’ll get there soon enough.)

My husband is particularly good at wearing down the hems of his pants. (Another sign of aging…you seem to get shorter and your pants drag on the ground.)

Although for those of us who have never been considered tall, dragging hems is a lifelong problem.

But hey! We fix our clothes now. I’d love to do a blog post on fast fashion and where all our cheap clothes end up. We all know it’s a problem. We can’t just keep purchasing new clothes and throwing out the old ones or even just donating them. Third world countries are telling us to keep our crap. They have enough stupid t-shirts, thanks.

Here’s a pair of stretchy pants that were way too long and were an easy fix on a serger using the cover stitch.

Of course, mending and hemming are where a serger really comes in handy. For the shredded hems. I just run them through the serger and hem on the sewing machine. Takes a few minutes, and the pants get a bit shorter, but a really quick solution, all things considered.

Speaking of all things NOT considered, here’s another mending project.

I have this sweatshirt which I made, and it is actually quite loved. Worn and worn and worn. But I set it aside when I realized it had grease stains on the front. Probably from cooking at some point. Aprons actually do have a function, but I’m not yet ready to wear one around the house. (That’s really crossing an old lady rubicon for me. Still, why deny the inevitable?)

I decided to cover it with some hand embroidery. Looking back, I probably should have just embroidered a few strategically-placed daisies and been done with it. Instead, I used a photo out my back window, and converted it to a hand embroidery design.

I drew it out onto a piece of wash away stabilizer, so I could see it on the dark fabric. I think I should have just drawn it using a white pencil. The washaway stabilizer made every stitch a bit harder to push and pull through. And there are a LOT of stitches.

This design took me a ridiculously long time to finish. So simple, yet so time-consuming.

And to be honest, I’m not a hundred percent sure I love it, but it is interesting. The washaway was rather stubborn and I had to rinse it in the sink for quite a while.

I finally threw it into the wash and pulled it out before it got to the dryer. I ironed it while it was still damp.

Here’s a tip:

When ironing embroidery, even machine embroidery, use a towel on top of the embroidery. A hot iron will flatten it and take away all the dimension, and it might even harm the thread. So just use a towel over the top which allows the threads in the design to have a place to go.

It turned out kind of fun, almost like a window in the middle of my sweatshirt. In fact, I’m thinking I just might add a frame around it to make it look like a window. It has that hand-made feel, which is something that was important to me. I also get a kick that it’s the early spring view out my family room window. All in all, it was a learning experience.

I love the look of visible mending that all the kids are doing these days. I’ll be trying more and more. I have plenty of jeans with holes in the knees.

Here’s to making things last a bit longer. Like the planet.

Hugs and stitches.

Who Are We? Quilter’s Survey 2022 Now Published

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The new Quilter’s Survey 2022 funded by Premier Needle Arts is here and we are in it.

You can see it in the above image. If you want to see the a summary of the whole survey, you can find it here. (Thanks to Craft Industry Alliance)

In case you aren’t able to access images, here’s a quick summary. We are:

  • Female
  • In our 60’s
  • Mostly Retired
  • Been quilting for over 10 years
  • Work on 10-12 projects a year
  • Spend 6 hours or more per week

In addition, the quilt market continues to increase, as it has for the last 10 years. Somewhere around 8-10% of us are new quilters. (New quilters are usually over 50 years old.)

We decide where to shop based on location and fabric selection. (I think we all knew this.) We love our local quilt shops and prefer to shop there.

However, e-commerce continues to expand. And we are using YouTube and other social media channels for How-To info…which may say something about the future of in-person classes.

A missed opportunity for knowledge, in my humble opinion, is the truly social aspect of quilting. The origin of quilting was the sewing bee, the “coming together”. We love our quilt guilds and other communal activities. I would be curious about how this aspect is changing. Or if it is changing at all.

The survey, of course, is designed to help the industry understand where the market is going.

But I will say this much: For the last 10 years I have been hearing about how the quilt market continues to grow. Yet, I’ve seen small quilt shop after small quilt shop close and there just are not others waiting in the wings to pick up the slack.

While the market may be growing, the quilt shops we love are not surviving. I think it is partly because of the pandemic, partly because of e-commerce, partly because of the slow end of of the baby boomer wealth, and finally, fabric is expensive. Cotton and resources and the supply chain are just not getting easier in a world where resources are finite.

Where does that leave us?

I don’t know.

But today I’m going to work on one of my lap quilts and carry on supporting the one local quilt shop in my area that is still thriving.

I don’t think we can change the trajectory, but we can do our best.

The Eco-Redemption of My Husband’s Pants

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One day my husband strolled in the house after work, and turned his back to me to put something in the sink.

Me: Did you wear those pants all day at work?

Him: (slowly turning) Why?

Me: (coming up behind him and wiggling my cold fingers through the giant tear in his rear end.) Just wondering.

Him: (turning in circles, and reaching around) Oh man. Can you fix it?

He stripped right there in the kitchen and I made the obvious assessment.

Me: No. That tear is shredded, the fibers throughout are worn, and those pants should be thrown out.

Him: I really like these. Can’t you…(waves hands) make something else out of them?

Of course I can. And now I’m looking at my whole closet differently.

The pic above is the original tear. And you can plainly see that the seven inch tear down his backside was not going to be an easy fix. And look at those beltloops…worn past recognition.

He brings a bag to work every day for his lunch, so he needs a few of them. That’s where I started. A simple bag made from his pants.

I used the pant leg hems for the finish at the top. Some simple coordinating straps and I handed him a new bag the next day.

A few days later he was helping me hang a mirror in our son’s room and he strolled past a pillow and stopped in his tracks.

Him: Is that made from my pants?

Of course it was. I ran out of fabric for the back, so I used some coordinating fabric from my stash. A little serged trim and voila! New pillow. That button was salvaged years ago from the flea market where I am inclined to purchase containers of old buttons.

This is all that remains, but I’m saving it. Sometime when I’m watching TV, I’m going to harvest that zipper, and possibly those hooks. All that will be left will be a few shreds.

I’m starting to think about all our old clothes the same way. Fast fashion, as you know, is one of the hugest polluters on the planet. We purchase clothes for a season and off they go to the donation box or just the trash. They’re not constructed to last.

Now, I can’t really say that about my husband’s pants. He’s been known to wear his clothes until they literally turn to dust.

He’s way ahead of his time.

But now I’m re-examining everything in our closets. Doesn’t fit? Hmmm. It matches this thing over here. Polyester? Oooh, that will last 200 years before it breaks down. What can I do with that? Scarlet O’Hara and her drape-y dress have nothing on me. I’ve been giving my old drapes the side eye. (And of course, all I can think of is Carol Burnett coming down those stairs…)

You might be surprised at the inspiration you get from things already in your home. Have a little fun with it.

The Biggest Trend 2020 and Beyond

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If you know me, you know I love to follow the big trends. What’s happening in the world that can affect our daily lives and the sewing world? What’s changing? What’s new?

It’s always a good question to ask at the beginning of a year, but even a better one at the beginning of a decade.

I pay attention to the research all the time, but it’s grown louder and the number one trend of the future is simple:

Sustainability

This is a BIG category. And it can mean anything from recycling to eating less meat to driving a hybrid or an electric car to purchasing organic to turning down the heat in your home.

One of the trend-watching groups I monitor says that we have moved from eco-aware to eco-shaming. I thought this was significant. They did not break this down by age groups and I suspect that’s pretty important. I do not hear as many Boomers worked up about their SUV’s as I see young people who don’t really want to even learn to drive. The kids do, but only because it’s a necessity. And they almost certainly don’t want to have the burden of owning cars.

Like everything, that’s a generalization.

But, like it or not, it is reality. Humans need to be sustainable in everything. And we’re not. Not by a long shot.

If you understand anything about Climate Change, it’s this: Fossil fuels need to stay in the ground. You’ve seen the folks out there protesting – #KeepItInTheGround . That’s the biggest impact possible and the reason the Earth is warming. This is not my opinion. It’s backed up by research from every possible sector of science. Except, of course, the fossil fuel industry. (Even they are making changes. When Tom Skilling asked the CEO of Shell Oil “What is the future of Shell Oil?” he responded, “Not oil.” They are busy doing R and D on longer-lasting, more efficient batteries.) Just know that it took thousands of years for those fossil fuels to form in the Earth and burning so much of it in a matter of decades simply does not give the planet the chance to self-correct. And I assure you, the planet is self-correcting. But we’ve over-burdened it. And we have the technology to change, but not necessarily the political or financial will to fix things.

Tangential to that is the rest of the idea of sustainablity which might affect sewists in a more direct way. I wrote a blog about organic cotton right here.

Every aspect of our modern way of living is up for improvement.

What’s that ancient Chinese curse?

May you live in interesting times.

We certainly do. We can and must do better than we are doing now. I have made a pledge to myself to purchase only organic cotton in the future. But, you may argue, the cotton is only half the story. What about the processing? What about the dyes? To that I answer: GOTS certified organic cotton (Global Organic Textile Standard). They are doing the work of research for all of us.

We can no longer deny our place on the planet and our impact on it. Individual activity will almost certainly NOT solve the whole problem. We must work together within and across nations for the benefit of ourselves and others.

That is a challenge sewists can understand.