Igenlode Wordsmith

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I managed to repair an old lace parasol (not 'vintage', I think, as the inside had plastic parts) by cutting down and lashing on a cut-down rawlplug to replace the missing wooden tip, so that the canopy extended under the appropriate tension when unfolded.
Ideally it would have been a wooden rawlplug for a better match, but I couldn't find one in my collection of scraps and wasn't about to go out on a hunt for an entire new packet of rawlplugs :-p

I lashed and whipped the edge of the lace canopy fairly securely through the split in the 'tip' (held together chiefly by the whipping!)

Now I just need to find an appropriate recipient, i.e. a lady who thinks a lace parasol is pretty and doesn't object to the fact that it has been 'rescued'...

I had steeled myself to finally get round to sewing on a replacement collar button ( Read more... ) before I could repair the button I had first to reinforce the edges of the buttonhole.

( Read more... ) After a lot of effort and working back over the existing lumpy doubled section I eventually managed to create a reasonably neat and workable result, but it certainly would not pass any Savile Row standards.

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( Read more... )

Most people, of course, simply use the 'buttonholer' on their sewing machine and cut down the centre of the resulting rectangle -- although this leaves a raw edge between the rows of stitching it generally wears away in use in any case -- but since I don't have that option on my hundred-year-old machine I need to do the earlier tailoring techniques that physically enclose the cut edge, whether by knotting thread over it or by encasing it in a fold of cloth.... But really, using button-hole stitch is the harder of the two!

I spent much of the rest of yesterday (when not looking for clocks) going round shops in a vain attempt to find a 50-inch bungee cord to replace the greetings-card holder (a long length of narrow bungee cord with lightweight clips threaded along it) that I have been using as a temporary washing-line. The outer casing of the latter, which was never intended to be exposed to bright sunlight for extended periods, has been disintegrating for some time, and although I have already repaired the ends the middle is now falling apart in a most decided fashion!

( Making an improvised extendable washing line ) At least I found a use for some of those scraps saved by generations of ancestors in the hopes that they might some day become useful :-D

Well, I've actually started on the crackfic prompt about Perrette's daughter :-)
And exactly as predicted, it has almost immediately turned from any sort of attempt at humour into a perfectly straight R/C fic, which is what almost invariably happens as soon as you get inside Raoul's head -- apparently the boy simply can't think about anything else! ( Read more... )
( Leather journal )

NB: the bias binding on the neck of my pyjamas has worked beautifully. I have had no further discomfort at all, and my hemming survived the washing machine in perfect condition! Thank goodness for that.

Finally! I got round to putting yet another (the fourth(!)) sleeve patch and darn into the shoulder of my pyjama jacket, and at last I have pyjamas to wear again. (Since I was previously delaying wearing them because they needed to go through the wash, I have been sleeping in my underwear for more than a week -- with hindsight it would have been much better simply to have made the necessary excavations to get my second pair of summer pyjamas out of the bottom of the remaining trunk of seasonal clothing, which I still haven't finished emptying...)
I have, however, been forced to retire not one but two pairs of pants in quick succession, one of them due to damage caused while I was trying to mend it.

And my largest mesembryanthemum popped up an unexpected neon flower this morning, with lots more now visible in bud; after last year's travails, the mesembryanthemums have been almost embarrassingly successful this time round, growing far larger than before and threatening to overspill even their wide shallow tray. The biggest one is now relatively huge.

( basil )

( chillies )

( tomatoes )

I managed to put my foot through a sheet this morning -- not the sides-to-middle one I only just finished, but the bottom sheet that shrank in its first wash (I didn't read the label and hadn't realised in any case that rushing it through on the machine's 1 hour programme would heat the water to 60C) and had to have a strip inserted into it in order to make it fit the bed again.

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I assumed that the seam must have ripped along the stitching line, but in fact it is still quite sound (and the stitches hasn't burst either) -- the fabric has simply torn through at a point definitely clear of the seam. Although it may not be a coincidence that it is close by. ( Read more... )

Right, I've finished Chapter probably-the-14th-and-last (unless I lost count somewhere or other along the way) of "An Outsider and a Foreigner", on Hertha's forlorn sentiment that she can't possibly tell Raoul how she feels about him. I hope her motivations for this are sufficiently clear; I'm not at all sure that they are. But I couldn't seem to fit the extra explanation in to the prose for the ending (I had enough difficulty steering a way to the ending at all), which means that it's only covered in her dialogue with Christine several pages earlier on, and in a couple of fragmentary sentences at that: "And hurt us both all the more? I don't want his pity. [...] He has the right to be left in peace -- by both of us."

No, I'm really not sure that's enough :-(

I mean, it seems to me painfully obvious that a one-sided confession, especially under these circumstances, is just going to make things exquisitely uncomfortable for both of them and imperil the relationship that they do have -- speaking from bitter experience -- but Hertha doesn't explicitly address that anywhere...

I'm also very much in two minds about whether I'm actually going to write the planned epilogue at this point. ( Read more... )

I've almost completed the sides-to-middle operation on the sheet -- I thought I had, but annoyingly I discovered some more holes near the top edge. They are small rips in otherwise sound fabric, dating back to the era of the rats and caused by climbing up the corner of the bed, and I never bothered with them while they were near the hem of the sheet and always securely tucked in. But turning the worn centre to the outside has unfortunately turned out to result in bringing all those little crescent-shaped tears to the centre of the 'new' sheet, and in a prime location for me to catch a big toe in them and rip the whole thing to shreds :-(

So each one needs a flat darn, taking up to an hour each. ( Read more... )

I unpicked the collar of my new (second-hand) shirt in order to 'turn' it; what I hadn't realised was that this process is designed to work on a dress shirt with the buttonhole on a separate collar stand, and this one is a soft single-piece collar. What this article, for instance, doesn't tell you is that if you unpick "the whole collar along the seam where it attaches to the top of the shirt" and reverse it left to right, the button and button-hole will end up on the opposite side to all the other buttons on the shirt. Which isn't just an aesthetic issue, but means that you physically can't do it up because the top of the shirt then needs to overlap in the opposite direction; the button needs to be on the underneath, and it finds itself on the top!

( Swapping a button and buttonhole )

My pansies are being eaten by small soil-living slugs (despite being out on a roof balcony with a great expanse of hot tiles between them and the nearest patch of earth); almost daily when I lift the pots I find another batch nestled up in the drainage holes, and their tell-tale tracks are visible up above. ( seedling progress )

Another shirt has ripped in the wash -- not just the armhole seam, but a tear from it leading down the front where the cloth is soft and obviously worn out. Under normal circumstances I wouldn't even attempt to mend it, as it would require an enormous patch of awkward shape, and would in addition be very hard to find sufficient sound cloth to anchor it. But I'm running out of every-day shirts. ( Read more... )

Well, I could have saved myself the trouble of mending those pyjamas; they ripped decisively across the shoulder in the apparently sound cloth. Not sure if it's worth hanging on to the trousers on the grounds that normally it's the trousers that wear out first... probably not.

It's nice soft cotton for cleaning and polishing, though. I've now ripped off the button bands, seams, etc to reduce it to rag -- I'm favourably impressed that the sleeve didn't tear at the point where I'd mended it, but ripped preferentially across the undamaged cloth further down. Evidently I managed to make a repair stronger than the hole!