Sewing, Repairing and Reducing Waste

Once a month between April and October, a group of stitchers takes to the streets of Edinburgh, making themselves comfortable on camping chairs decorated with hand-embroidered banners inviting people to #stitchitdontditchit. Equipped with sewing baskets and mending skills, they repair their garments in public and teach interested passers-by how to do the same.

My first attempt doesn’t look as nice, since I was trying to sew down the last loops of the warp one at a time instead of taking them all off the hooks at once and then sewing them down.

Great and detailed article for those who have self-drafted or want to modify an existing pattern.

Cross/re-post of something I saved years ago :)

This is a cross-post, I thought it was neat :)

hell yeah

I'd love some advice on repairing or replacing this bamboo cup lid, which has lasted around 5 years otherwise!

I was recently looking at old posts in this community, and it reminded me that it's been over a year since I repaired these two backpacks and made a few posts about the process.

This video made me think of this community. Fixing a camping chair and stool with Tyvek is pretty inventive, as well as sewing a tent with the material!

My dog chewed her harness. Here's the mending job. Mended with embroidery floss by hand.

I've recently started darning my worn-out socks (shoutout to that one poster who posted a tutorial) and so it's going really well! My socks are still comfy, and the woven patches do the job.

Zipper pull made from some shoelace I had lying around:

This project is more stapling than sewing, but small upholstery projects are quite easy to do, and can be done with small amounts of fabric and padding. The padding for this project was mostly layers cut from an old quilt.

“Our philosophy is that if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Once you disassemble, repair, and put back together your laptop or iPod, you have a much better understanding of what goes into it. It’s astounding how just 20 minutes of work can make an iPod good as new – but most people have no idea that there are instructions available to make the work easy. And why should they? Apple tells everyone that the battery isn’t user-serviceable.“

This is an update to this post.

This backpack has been stowed away at the back of my closet for a few months waiting to be fixed. It was being held together pretty tenuously: Sewed some of the smaller rips, then added repair tape to the largest one:

Glued and sewed a larger piece of gear repair tape to add fidelity to the ripped edge: Then sewed the rip itself with fishing line (the strongest thing I could think of to hold the weight of the bag's contents, plus I just happened to have it at home:

I have made a short video showing how I darn my socks, using a netting stitch rather than straight stitches.

I often find holes wear in my jeans between the legs, so I patch them with fabric on the inside and lots of rows of zig-zag sewing.

I've been looking for more adjustable closure ideas (excluding zippers and buttons) and ways to reduce my fabric cutting waste. This tutorial pointed me in the right direction!

This looks like a great resource for anyone in USA & Canada

My feet are right at the top of most size ranges, which means I am constantly wearing holes in the toes. I have taken to darning the hole - or often sewing over the thinning patch to reinforce it before a hole wears through.

There is not really an outdoors/camping community I could find on Lemmy yet, so I thought nature was close! This is a cool site that shows you how you can make your own outdoors gear.

This little bag is one of my recent projects. I was gifting a couple of jars of homemade jam, so used an upholstery sample piece to make a bag.