This morning I set about mending underwear-- bloomers that are wonderful to wear with dresses and skirts. I've sewn a few pairs over the years--for winter using soft merino wool and in finely ribbed cotton jersey for summer, trimmed with lace (see photo). Good design, good material--worth mending!

The channel that holds the elastic at the waist had come unstitched in incremental sections on two pairs. A third pair of bloomers had a couple small runs in the lightweight knit fabric, leaving horizontal lines of thread like a ladder missing the vertical threads. Usually when getting dressed in the morning, extracting one of these pairs of underwear from the drawer I'd notice the flaw and reflect, "this needs repair." Meanwhile they were wearable.

Yesterday I washed three yards of navy blue linen fabric in warm water to pre-shrink it and added the unmended bloomers to the laundry load. Hanging them to air dry overnight, the cotton jersey fabric was slightly crisp in the morning, a perfect texture for sewing. Swapping the red thread in the sewing machine to black, I alternated between a zigzag stitch to close the gaps in the elastic channel and a straight stitch to repair the runs in the material (sewing a virtually undetectable fisheye dart to encase the fray). With a few snips of thread it was done! Kind of cathartic.

Mending

Slow Style

Slow Style is an ongoing project by Sarah Kate Beaumont who since 2008 has designed and crafted every piece of her wardrobe. She has not purchased clothing since the project began.

Combining art and craftsmanship Beaumont’s project embraces individual style and sustainability. It seeks to empower others to question assumptions of consumerism with its inherent cycle of acquisition and disposal, and as an alternative, to explore self-reliance in our shared ecosystem.

verysweetlife studio

Slow Style