I’ve kept pretty busy lately with sewing, and boy, the things you can run into. I had to repair 10 out of twelve Wrangler jeans hip pockets on three pair of jeans. The ripped hole is not much larger than a quarter on each one, but I usually go three widths around the hole to darn the backing denim good and solid to the existing denim fabric. That makes for a lot of sewing. Since I’m doing this on my Singer 319W treadle, I took two days to do them all. My treadle leg (I just use my right foot) wore out the first day before I was finished with them.
While my leg was recovering, I began sewing 26 embroidered shoulder patches on a batch of new police uniform shirts and coats. For that, I got to use our new-to-us Singer 431G freearm electric machine. Golly, I sure like that machine. It runs so smooth and quiet, it’s just a pleasure to operate. The shirts went fine, but the nylon coats were the pits, but it wasn’t the fault of the machine. The coats had a thin nylon “floating” liner in the sleeve that gave me fits keeping it straight. And the slickery new nylon doesn’t feed very well on feed dogs at all. But, I gottem done.
Then, I had to mend a pair of fashion jeans for a young lady, that has intentional rips in the legs that the edges of the rip is “frizzed out” as part of the fashion. Bare skin can be seen through the rips down the legs. That’s the fashion part of them. Well, one of the frizzed rips was a little too high, showing more than she wanted to show, so I had to put a backing piece of denim behind that rip and attach it without cutting off any of the frizzies. She also had the beginnings of a “blow-out” in another spot, but that was fairly easy to repair. Since these jeans are the new stretch jeans, I have to be careful that I stretch the jeans while I darn them, to make sure I don’t mend them to be smaller than they had been to start with. The darned area doesn’t have much stretch to it. I call it “darned”, but I’m actually using a multi-zigzag stitch with a very short stitch length. Lots of stitches in a small area.
CD in Oklahoma