mending – Page 7 – Deborah Makarios

January 20, 2017

Ten Ways to a More Ethical Wardrobe

Most of us would like to have a more ethical wardrobe. Most of us don’t. It’s not a case of active ill will, or even apathy – it’s a matter of not knowing where to start. Or what to do.

After all, clothes don’t come with labels saying how many toxic chemicals were used in their manufacture, or how many hours of unsafe, underpaid or even forced labour went into their production.

Which makes it hard to know whether the item you are buying is supporting people who desperately need the work, or taking advantage of their desperation to effectively transform them into your outsourced slaves.
Which is why it was not only informative but invigorating to read Lucy Siegle’s book To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World? Because she not only points out the problems, but suggests a few solutions. I’ve collated ten of them here for your consideration.

1: choose your fibres carefully. Production, useful life, disposal. Some man-made fibres are actually less unfriendly to the environment in production than, say, cotton; but on the flip side your grandchildren’s grandchildren will be cold in their graves and the stuff still won’t have rotted down. I recommend Siegle’s book for a more in-depth analysis of the pros and cons of various fibres. Organic cotton and wool are two of the better options.

2: mend. Siegle suggests putting aside 10% of your clothing budget for mending; you get more Little Old Lady points if you do the mending yourself. Personally, I take my shoes to a cobbler for resoling and mends (considerably cheaper than a new pair of good shoes), but I try to do other mending myself – buttons, hems, darning…

3: buy second hand. Alas, the nature of fast-fashion means that the quality of second-hand clothing is considerably lower than it once was: if you expect people to move on to something new after two or three wearings, there’s no need to make the item durable. Not to mention that if you’re a sweatshop worker paid by the item, there’s a lot of pressure to construct the garment quickly, not well. Still, good items can be found, they just take a bit more finding than they used to.

4: swap. Either casually, among friends (it helps to have friends of similar taste and/or size) or at an organized swap. As with buying second-hand, it gives the garment a useful second life, rather than consigning it to the dump.

5: make your own. I was delighted to read Siegle’s line, “In many ways knitting is the perfect cornerstone for the burgeoning ethical fashion movement.” I can knit my own socks, hats, gloves and so forth; my next big batch of skills to be acquired is learning how to sew my own clothes. Obviously, this is a long-term, take-it-a-step-at-a-time proposition. Still, the freedom inherent in being able to decide for yourself what cloth, cut and colour you want, instead of being forced to choose from a limited number of options, is very alluring.

6: launder carefully. We tend to forget that some of a garment’s eco-impact is neither in its birth nor in its death, but in its life with us. Wash your clothes in cold water, air-dry where possible, and don’t wash your clothes unless they actually need it. (You don’t need to launder a garment just because it’s touched your body. Unless you have some sort of oozing skin disease…) Avoid dry-cleaning too, if you can – the ‘perc‘ which is most commonly used in dry-cleaning is not only carcinogenic but neurotoxic. And in any case, most things marked ‘dry clean only’ do not explode in a ball of flames if you gently hand-wash them.

7: re-use materials. One garment can be refashioned into another. A sheet can become a dress. A pair of jeans can embark on a second life as a skirt. A hideous knitted monstrosity from the op-shop can be unravelled for the wool and reknitted into something much more appealing. (Unless it’s glittery mohair. Not much can be done about that.)

8: buy from ethical brands. This takes a fair bit of digging, as nothing pleases the corporate pocket-book more than marketing to the fair-minded without actually putting their money where their mouth is, but happily there are those who will do some of the digging for you. Baptist World Aid’s Ethical Fashion Guide is compiled for the Australian market, but globalization being what it is, people from all over will find it useful.

9: move slowly. Don’t allow yourself to be rushed into purchases, either by lack of planning (hole in the last good pair of socks!) or by cunning marketing ploys. Do your due diligence. Plan ahead. Savour the pleasures of anticipation. Don’t buy anything unless you’re sure that you’re making a good decision, one that you’ll be happy with tomorrow (and all the years to come).

10: consume less. As Dame Vivienne Westwood says, “Buy less. Choose well. Make it last. Quality, not quantity. Everybody’s buying far too many clothes.” Wearing the same things over and over again is not a penance when each item is something you love, something which tells the world a bit about who you are, something that is a pleasure to wear.

Lucy Siegle writes at the end of To Die For, “Free of the constraints of endless consumption, you can have a wardrobe that is more sustainable, more valuable, more enduring and more you.”

Doesn’t that sound wonderful? If you’re anything like me, there’s a fair way to go yet, but we can get there – one step at a time.

October 21, 2016October 20, 2017

Those Darned Sleeves

Remember that scene in Cool Runnings when they arrive in Calgary and Sanka rushes back into the terminal to put on everything in his bag, followed by the bag? Thirteen years ago, that would have been me arriving in New Zealand, had my grandmother not met us at the airport with a better bag: a bag full of woollies, knitted with her own two hands.

That bag included a grass-green guernsey for me, a garment which I immediately put on and have worn for large parts of every year since. When it was two years old, I wore it to said grandmother’s funeral, along with some of my similarly guernseyed cousins (she was a very productive woman, my gran). I have done many wardrobe clear-outs over the years, of varying levels of drasticitude, but I have never considered getting rid of my guernsey.

So you can imagine my distress on noticing that the cuff was wearing thin at the fold. But we were in the middle of moving house, packing everything up and so on; hardly a good time to settle down to some mending. I did manage to go through the box of ancestral happiness which contained all the odds and ends of wool left behind by this same knitting grandmother, looking for matching wool to mend with. Alas, there was not so much as a scrap of the original yarn, but I pulled out a few greens and packed them separately, so as to have them to hand.

Imagine my horror, on one of our first mornings in this house, when I pulled the guernsey on and my finger went through a hole.

hole-close — This is what our camera thinks grass-green looks like.

There was no time to be lost. I found the assortment of green yarns and compared them with the original to decide which was closest. There was one that was Close Enough to Do, I decided; no need to hit the shops before a mend could be undertaken. The next question was one of method. It may be “sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,” but for raveled sleave of guernsey you need some kind of a darn.

Results having finally come through (or rather worn through) from the sock-darning experiment, I thought I would go with the classic back-and-forth darn. One of my vintage handwork books recommends a sort of Swiss darning for holes in knitted things (there’s a tutorial here if you dare), but I quailed at the thought. I was by no means sure of my ability to execute it correctly – and the idea of taking scissors to the beloved garment brought me out in a cold sweat. This was no mere sock, after all. This was the last garment my gran ever made for me, and while there may be knitting where she has gone (I sure hope there is), they don’t allow for forwarding to the bereaved descendants.

The stakes were high. I gathered my materials from the various locations to which a state of partial unpackedness had spread them.

The actual darning wasn’t too much trouble, once I’d figured out a way to weave the needle in which didn’t leave long strands on the wrong side – or right side, if the cuff is folded back, though I doubt there is a right side for long unattached strands. There was more to do than I’d realized, however: the hole was small, but the eight-ply-worn-almost-to-lace section ran about halfway round the cuff. It took a while.

The problem with darning, as identified by Miss Mary Grant, is that it is not exactly mentally invigorating – but it does require you to keep your eyes on what you are doing. Happily, however, ears are not a necessary part of the darning equipage, and you can listen to music, download an audiobook from Librivox, or, like me, get your nearest and dearest to read aloud to you while you work. It tends to take longer than you think. Just when you reach the end of the patch with your up-and-downs, you realize now you have to do all the back-and-forths (or vice versa).

At least the camera’s odd rendition of colour makes the mend easier to see.

But at last it is finished. I am happy to say that the sleeve was saved: the darning not only captured any thread that was thinking of unravelling, but reinforced the whole worn area. It’s thick and sturdy now, I think it will survive.

Wikipedia describes the guernsey as “a particularly hardy item of clothing” and notes that “It is not uncommon for a guernsey to last several decades and be passed down in families.” I don’t know if my guernsey will last that long (though it is well into its second decade now), but I intend to give it every opportunity to do so.

Who knows? Maybe one day I will even have the guts to try Swiss darning. It’s certainly more beautiful than plain darning. Still, while my mend may not be pretty, it’s practical, and that’s what guernseys are all about. And I am glad that my practical skills can keep the guernsey together while it keeps me warm.

Today’s bit of Old-Fashioned wisdom is brought to you by the guernsey: Keep Warm and Carry On.

March 4, 2016

Preparing for an Uncertain Future

No, I’m not suggesting that we should all become preppers. It’s a good idea to be prepared for whatever kind of natural disaster your area is prone to, but I don’t think it pays to mortgage your present for a merely possible future.

I have, however, been preparing for a change this past month. At the beginning of February it seemed distinctly possible that by the time the month was out we would have moved to a house half the size of the one we currently live in. And while that didn’t happen, I still needed to prepare in case it did.

Cue a major pruning. So major, in fact, that I gave up the idea of writing for the month (apart from keeping up with the blog, obviously) and didn’t bother with trying to keep a purge list, because it would have taken too long. The downside of that is that I have trouble remembering everything that has left our house (a sure sign that we had too much stuff).

There was a whole boxful of kitchen things, including the sole survivor of my first ever set of wineglasses (the other three leapt to a glittering end during the first Canterbury earthquake); there were more books, some cassette tapes and CDs, a variety of clothing (some so worn that it had to be binned), and half a recycling bin’s worth of stuff I’d been keeping in my desk. Also a whole bunch of what might be described as general stuff.

I’ve also been working on my stash of unfinished projects – important for peace of mind, freed-up space, and maintaining my Finishing-Person reputation. The crazy quilt was finished last year, it is true, but that still left me with the rose quilt (a project even older than the crazy quilt, if my memory serves me correctly at this distance), a pair of half-knitted gloves, a block quilt to be assembled, a cardigan to be knitted from recycled wool, and a large backlog of mending.

During February I made progress on the rose quilt, finished the gloves, and did most of the mending – there’s just one more waistband to be done and it’ll be finished. I am pleased with my progress, but also horrified at how much work there still is to be done. The Grand Purge is now mostly finished, and I’m back to writing (or rather rewriting) in March, but chaos, as ever, still lurks on the horizon.

Chaos, you ask? In a post-purge household? Well, yes. While we didn’t end up moving into the half-the-size house, we may find ourselves three weeks from a move at any time. This is exciting, but also somewhat stressful, particularly since we have no idea what size house we’ll end up moving to, and therefore whether or not a further Grand Purge will be required to fit. Because as much as we’ve got rid of, there’s always more that could be pared away. Like the rest of life, our simplicity is a work in progress – but the progress is feeling good.