Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Patched and Woven - 2018 Begins

This year has been slow for me with blogging.  But I have actually accomplished some things.
One thing that I had been planning to try for a while is a Japanese rough mending technique that is known as boro.  The stitching in it reminds me greatly of large stitch quilting such as my maternal grandmother used in making her quilts.  Since one pair of blue jeans had a worn hole in the knee, I needed to do some type of mending on them.  True confession - I used Mistyfuse to keep the piece of denim on the back of the hole while doing the stitching. This is certainly not a traditional method - but it works well.  With the patch in place, some of my weaving cotton thread became the stitching thread for the big stitches.  Here is the result on the knee of this pair of jeans.

The white base threads of the denim are purposefully pushed
apart to show the denim patch underneath for this photo.
The discovery that I made while doing this is that a piece of cardboard inside the leg of the pants will reduce or eliminate the risk of sewing the leg closed. (Yes I did pull out a  few stitches from the first attempt.)

I also finished weaving the cloth that was on my loom for the New Year's Day "weave in."
 My plan was to hang this outside in the sun for a photo  - but it has been very cold and mostly gloomy/overcast here lately.  Here are some detail shots of some of my favorite parts.

The way that the colorful warp threads show through the woven fabric really makes my heart sing.

I did another weaving that I have not yet show.  This is a scarf that was given to a friend who lives in Kentucky, but spends a couple of months in the winter in Florida near my Nana.
She absolutely loves it. 

I gave the scarf to her while we were in Florida this past long weekend.  Because of the extreme cold and possible difficult travel conditions we had to come home a day earlier than planned.  But in spite of that issue, we had a lovely time.

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7 comments:

allthingzsewn said...

That turned out beautifully. I'm assuming that weaving would be relaxing, like maybe hand stitching?

Jeanna said...

You've created a nice designer pair of jeans just by patching a hole. There is money to be made here :)

Your weaving is spectacular, as usual. I love the scarf you made your friend.

A Left-Handed Quilter said...

Your neck of the woods is way too cold for me!! I get cold just reading about your weather - brrrrrrr!! I really like your "knee patch" - that could be the start of a new trend - LOL. And that "colorful" warp is by far my favorite - such HAPPY colors - ;))

Debbie said...

Still love your scarves. Great knee hole cover up! Looks good.

Marlene said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Marlene said...

I really love doing Boro. Although I find the current fashion of artificially ripped and worn jeans to look rather contrived and fake, I do love the look of a well patched pair, repaired lovingly by hand, to extend the life of the garment.

Kathleen said...

Your "weave in" cloth is beautiful, as is the scarf. So colorful and happy. The patch job on your jeans is great too. First thing I thought upon seeing the picture is "here's lookin' at you kid!" . . . The way you moved the threads made it look like an eye to me :) . I was going to ask if you had to undo a seam to do the boro patch but you had a clever work-around for that!