The Aerie
Sat and did my mending yesterday. It's odd how much of it had piled up. Star Trek Voyager, a show I've long neglected, was due to be on, and I had to be home in the evening in order to prod the kids through their homework paces, so I figured I might as well watch it.
So I collected together all the things which had lost or were about to lose buttons and enshrined myself in front of the toob. My daughter joined me, pasting together a class project on the floor in front of the TV, and by the end of the evening all the kids were there.
The odd thing was trying to find the buttons. I'm not the best at keeping track of small things like buttons. I looked upstairs. I looked downstairs. Finally I figured I'd get started and do what I could and not worry about what was missing. As I headed back to star sewing I reached in my pocket.
All the buttons were there. How did they get there? It's not as if I found them and put them in my pocket, because I was still looking for them. No, they simply appeared in my pocket after I'd been wearing the pants all day. I have no idea, but I'm not complaining - usually my life works the other way around.
A while back my friend Speedy embroidered some shirts with my company logo. So of all the shirts I own, which one did the washing machine decide was the tastiest? That's right, my best logo shirt. It not only tore a button loose from the shirt, but it carved a small square of the shirt fabric from underneath the button like the tax man coring out a pound of flesh. Sewing the button in place was a combination of tailoring and cosmetic surgery, but it seems to have worked out, I'm wearing the shirt today.
The stitching made me wonder how many people mend shirts anymore. I know they don't mend socks. Even I don't mend socks. My youngest tears through socks the way that I used to, and I simply pull them off his feet and toss them in the trash. I wonder how many people sew buttons back on, and how many just pitch the shirt in the rag bag or the trash and buy another.
After that I had another shirt to mend. As I worked on this shirt I realized that the top two buttons were held on with only one loop of thread instead of two. What!? The bottom buttons had four-square thread X's, but the top two had just one diagonal loop.
How could this be! An outrage! No doubt this was why I had lost the first button. I could picture the ten-year-old girl in the east Asian sweatshop, chuckling to herself. "Ha! I will sew the button on insecurely! Take THAT, American pig-dog world exploiters! I have earned today's nickle for only HALF the work!"
I added thread to sew the extra loops on myself.
After Enterprise ended my daughter loaded up "The Princess Bride." What a movie. More quotable lines per frame than anything since "Holy Grail," and only half as silly.
"Who are you?"
"No one of consequence."
"I must know."
"Get used to disappointment."
"'Kay."
They just don't write 'em like that anymore, especially not during fencing scenes.
Next I sewed the button onto the waistband of a pair of pants. I can't imagine why my waistband button would find themselves coming loose... it's not like their job is getting harder every month... (sucking in gut)
Finally I had a button to secure on my overcoat -- it wasn't off yet, but it was coming loose, so I tightened it up. Since I didn't have heavy button thread I just added regular thread to the existing button. It will tear loose, but then the button won't fall off, it will just be back to where it was before.
Finished up around ten o'clock, with all the kids watching the end of Princess Bride. An oddly domestic, cozy little event - stitching buttons, doing homework, my youngest dawdling through his piano practice.
Kind of nice.
Posted by Albatross at April 15, 2004 10:55 AM