I have a fairly exacting day job, where if something is off by more than 1/16 of inch, there is going to be trouble. No one dies (I’m not a heart surgeon), but there is wasted material, work to be redone and general unhappiness.
This shows up in my crafting in a reversal of priorities – I prefer to work on projects that, to paraphrase Bob Ross contain “no mistakes, just happy accidents.”
So no surprise the visible mending trend makes my heart happy. Some of it is quite formal, such as the Sashiko and Boro techniques. But some of it is more of an ordered chaos, and that’s what I really enjoy.
Conveniently, I have a need for this style of repair. And as usual, it isn’t what you’d normally think of.
Oh, sure, I’ve dabbled with decorative stitches and iron on patches and combinations of both to repair clothes, especially Mr. SuzerSpace’s jeans. He seems to get a hole in the same spot of the upper thigh of every pair he owns (I think it’s from his laptop) and since he works from home, he at least pretends to enjoy the monsters, space aliens and “whoops it was supposed to be a robot but it looks more like the StayPuff Marshmallow Man, sorry” creations I’ve made.
But my new hobby appears to be patching the couch cushions.
A long time ago, we bought a slipcovered sofa, with the idea that when the slipcover became too worn, we’d get a new one. Which was a great idea, right up to the point where the place where I bought the sofa went out of business
My sewing skills are definitely not up to fitted slipcovers. So I wondered if anyone was visibly mending furniture. Of course they are.
For even more ideas, the Internet fed me the mother of all links at Reddit.
And after dreaming of all the beautiful and amazing ways I was going to patch the holes on our denim slipcover, I realized that all of them were going to violate the “no mistakes, just happy accident” crafting guideline.
And I went another direction. I have a pile of old jeans (mine and Mr. SuzerSpace’s) and I’ve been rotary trimming them into 2 x 2 squares. I’ve used fusible web to iron them in a diamond pattern as needed on the cushion covers, and then I go around them with a zig zag stitch in a light gray thread so it sort of disappears. Hopefully my stitching isn’t very visible (which hides my lack of straight lines or tight corners). But the squares/diamonds are very visible.
And rather than do up the entire cushion all at once, I just patch in sections as they wear through. In the really worn areas I’ve been backing the patches with all sorts of odd scraps of fabric so I have something to really stitch to.
It’s creating nice, organic, somewhat organized patterns across the cushions, and it is tons better than looking at the holes in the covers or draping a blanket on it and pretending the ugly part doesn’t exist.
I may go crazy and come back with colored thread and do some visible stitching over it all when it’s done. Or not 🙂
