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New acquisitions
I was given a beautiful soft and feather-light grey cashmere jumper for free because it had some moth damage. I very carefully closed up the small holes on the back using a dark grey cotton thread, and it really didn't show. Unfortunately the first time I wore it, when I took it off two new and larger holes appeared in the front due to the strain of being pulled over my head! (Which was precisely why I'd taken care to mend all the visible damage first.)
I've now darned up the holes in the front, which are three or four stitches wide, with a fine cream silk, but the darns are about a quarter of an inch square and very visible. Dark cotton would probably have worked better again...
Oh well, it's still as wearable as it ever was, and very soft and warm -- I wanted it as a under-layer anyway. More holes will probably appear until I locate all the damaged threads.
On the other hand, I scored a replacement 1-litre Thermos to replace my broken yoghurt-making flask, unwanted on the grounds that it was dirty and smelt of curry. The silvering in the interior shows signs of wear, but the plastic parts clean up all right and the Achilles heel of the silicon seal appears to be in good condition. It doesn't need to have perfect insulation, as I only want it to keep the yoghurt warm overnight. It just needs not to leak.
I've now darned up the holes in the front, which are three or four stitches wide, with a fine cream silk, but the darns are about a quarter of an inch square and very visible. Dark cotton would probably have worked better again...
Oh well, it's still as wearable as it ever was, and very soft and warm -- I wanted it as a under-layer anyway. More holes will probably appear until I locate all the damaged threads.
On the other hand, I scored a replacement 1-litre Thermos to replace my broken yoghurt-making flask, unwanted on the grounds that it was dirty and smelt of curry. The silvering in the interior shows signs of wear, but the plastic parts clean up all right and the Achilles heel of the silicon seal appears to be in good condition. It doesn't need to have perfect insulation, as I only want it to keep the yoghurt warm overnight. It just needs not to leak.
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It's worth it.
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I tested out the new Thermos with a batch of yoghurt last night; I was afraid I'd mixed the milk with the yoghurt while it was still too hot, and/or that it wouldn't stay warm when the Thermos was only half full. (This flask is twice the size of the old 'large' one, big enough to hold tea for five or six people -- but the whole point of getting another Thermos was so that I wasn't forced to make yoghurt in sufficiently large volumes to keep the earthenware pot warm all night!)
However it yoghurted all right, and came out still warm in the morning. I had forgotten the nuisance value of trying to extract solid yoghurt through a narrow flask neck, and of trying to clean the inside of the flask afterwards. I'm sure I used to have a longer bottle-brush when I was doing this before....
The weird thing was that the yoghurt turned out to have gone really grainy, which I've never seen. Apparently this is either the result of having heated up the milk too fast (probably) or else of having bought the 40p yoghurt rather than the £1.10 yoghurt as a new 'starter'; cheap yoghurt can have additional thickeners and additives that make it behave a bit oddly if you attempted to breed from it...
https://saladinajar.com/yogurt/why-is-my-homemade-yogurt-grainy/
Presumably if it was just the milk, then using the grainy yogurt as the starter for the next batch should be all right. (That web page says that you need to buy fresh starter after only three or four batches, but I only ditched my previous one after I left it too long and it started to smell cheesy; surely people have been making yoghurt from previous yoghurt for thousands of years without a break, just as beer yeasts have continuous lineages?)
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I've just found a small hole in a different jumper. Luckily I have a lot of embroidery thread, so I can usually come close to the correct colour.
Shame you can't make yoghurt with soy milk.... Ah, apparently you can, though you have to use a thickener like agar agar, so I'm not sure how much yogurt is actually involved and how much is really just a custard....
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I tried steel-grey cotton on the new arm hole and it looked dreadful -- so bad that I unpicked it, despite this enlarging the damage and went back to the pale silk :-(
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Also not one of my skills, at least at present...