dulia dexterity idolatrising

Bet this is your only New Year greeting from a potato.  If not, let me know.

Gimme some credit for finding a squirrel sewing!

It's not an innate talent in their species.

This all started when I came home from the studio the other day with a couple of sweaters, a blouse, and a pair of pants that the adorable Ollie Wood had ripped asunder with his baby shark teeth.  His tooth would pierce the fabric, I would pull away with force and the results were three-cornered tears in all.  Short of having all his teeth surgically removed, I needed to deal with it from a different angle, here goes.

Darning, Darn It
Ya never know what has gone around and then come around again.  Here we are in the land of plenty without stacks of plastic bags and new clothes bought at whim, and out of the Ether comes somebody who invent darning.  Well, dearie (I'm gonna talk like an old person here) back in my day we knew all about darning, darn it.  Back in the days before even black and white tv came on with Kate Smith going over the mountain, my mom would sit in the living room and open her sewing screen in front of her and pull the first item out of her mending bag.

Yeah, she kept a mending bag and added our holey items as they appeared.  And yeah, here is a sewing screen-  my dad made hers and I thought all dads made their wives sewing screens.  Wow, I was so sheltered!  I can remember them collaborating on exactly what needed to be included so there were headless nails on one shelf to hold thread (wooden spools, not the styrofoam stuff in today's thread).  There were pockets above for printed matter- directions for this or that cut from the Buffalo Evening News, smaller pockets for sewing essentials on the other side pockets.  My mother's didn't have a little shelf but I can see how that would be handy.  The whole thing closed up with a hook and eye fastener and the outside was covered in burlap with some fancy braid covering the tacks.  Very handy. How to darn a sock. And here we have a darning egg.  Sometimes they were in the shape of an egg, but the more advanced design had this handle.  You stuffed the egg down inside the sock to stretch it taut while you re-wove the holes.  It kept the mending from being pulled too tight and forming a very uncomfortable bump.  Little girls were taught very early how to darn socks and iron men's shirts (we started with ironing handkerchiefs).  Fortunately for me, non-wrinkle stuff was invented before I had a steady supply of shirts to iron.  
    Darn socks...  Oh, I mean DARNED socks.  Yup, the darning was done in pink because HOLD ON TO YOUR HATS-  people are now proud of their thrifty ways and show-off what we hid with matching threads and patches and yarns.  There is an English clothing company, Toast, that advertises:

This year, you can learn how to darn and mend your own clothes through our Art of Repair workshops taking place across all shops

They have a program (oops, make that 'programme') where they will teach you how to make new garments out of old garments bought from them.  We call that recycling, reusing. reimagining-  something many of us of a certain age were brought up doing.  I am not denigrating Toast's programmer, they are worthy and helpful, but geesh, things have sure changed now that they are monetizing the repair of their own garments.

A couple of seasons ago you could 'donate' old Eileen Fisher clothes back to a store and they would take them to New Mexico where some fledgling designers re worked and dyed them into new designs so Eileen could RESELL them again on special racks in their stores.  At market prices.

And lest your forget, since most of you are quilters, that's how our art form was developed-  we used scraps leftover from making clothes or curtains.  We cut up old clothes that could no longer be worn into new patches for quilts that had worn through.  We traded with neighbors and friends and ladies quilting societies for patterns and other people's scraps.  We did not buy fabric, we HAD fabric and found a way to stretch it even further.  And that's the end of my rant for the day- I think I will go shopping for some new clothes, preferably something that will eventually find it's way into a quilt. 

 ART OF THE DAY

For the ART OF THE DAY message I'm going to take you to an old quilt you need to know about:  Sarah Ellen Harding Baker,  a teacher and astronomer in Cedar County, Iowa, is rumored to have spent 7 years embroidering a beautiful appliquéd quilt to use as a visual aid in lectures.

Finished in 1876, the quilt is large enough that even a near-sighted student could see its planets and moons from the back row.

Orbits are indicated with silken threads against a black background.

The Smithsonian National Museum of American History, where Baker’s quilt is housed, notes that astronomy was deemed an acceptable interest for 19th-century women, which may explain the number of celestial-themed quilts that date to the period.

Guess that abut covers it on this first day of the year!  Finally the rains here have stopped and the sky is all Florida again, deep blue without clouds.  It's been a bad week for all the families who brought their bathing suits and pool floats down between Christmas and New Years.  Better luck next year.  

Sew Sew Sandy

(one of these days I need to make a new signature...)

Or do some more mending.