I'm attempting to sew a patch...run for your lives

     Now that I'm an adult, I find myself with a growing desire to mend things.  Oh, it's not out of any desire to help others or to save money. I just like solving problems and when I see something broken, I want to try to fix it. Of course, if I saw a broken refrigerator, I'm not going to attempt to fix that...I have no idea on how I would even start. I'm referring to simple things...like gluing the broken ceramic pieces of a vase back together. For today's challenge, I'm attempting to fix a hole in my boyfriend's flannel shirt.

     As you can see by the size of my hand, that's one pretty big hole (there's a joke in that somewhere). I had to trim off all of the frayed edges of the hole so I can mend the hole with clean edges.  Luckily, I had an old shirt that was destined for the scrap heap so I used it to create the patch.  Given the size of the hole, there wasn't anyway I could figure out how to create a patch the exact shape of the hole...so I made my patch square shaped and covered the entire darn thing.

 

     My stitching ability is not the strongest of all my talents (hard to believe isn't it?), but I did manage to connect the edges of the flannel hole to the patch.  The main difficulty that I encountered was that the flannel material was so thin in one area that I couldn't knot the end of the thread so that the stitches would stay put. And that's when inspiration hit...I'd use an ole friend of mine: liquid cement. Sorry, I won't mention the brand name here...that would be crazy ;)

     In the end, I decided to glue all of the stitches so they wouldn't EVER slip out of the material.  Then I trimmed the edges of the patch to make it look pretty. Luckily, the finished product is not something that will be seen in public. It's a comfort shirt and is only worn once the day is done so it only needs to be functional, not glamorous. And thus the journey ends...the hole has been sealed. Hey, I just killed 3 hours with a needle!



     What did we learn today old friends? You should always have a sewing kit, glue and scraps of fabric lying around. You never know when you need to fix a shirt...that really just needs to be thrown away, but someone that you love loves it so much that they would wear it until it becomes a bunch of rags...and THAT drives you to a level of OCD insanity so strong that you MUST find a sewing kit you haven't used in years just so you can do a crappy patch job and fix the shirt.

***On the plus side, I just had some delicious coconut gelato. All is well.