Bad Housekeeping

[shewhomust]

I have a purple shirt of which I am particularly fond. It was a present - and I never dare give clothes as gifts, there are so many things that could be wrong: the style, the size, the colour, the something indefinable that means you'd never wear it, even though you can't say why... But I was given this purple shirt, and I love it. It's a very loose weave, purple and black threads, mid-length sleeves, embroidered panels down the front in a shade so close to the fabric itself that you see texture rather than pattern, vaguely hippyish design.

People who are more clothes-aware than I am may already have spooted the snag: loose weave fabric, hippyish design... Whether because the fabric is too loose to take the seams, or because the seams were not well made in the first place, every time I wear it I find a new place where a seam is unravelling, usually for several inches. I wore it twice at the weekend, so yesterday I sat down to sew up the two new gaps.

And realised that one of them was not so new, I'd obviously started to stitch it up before, because there was a needle hanging down the seam on a length of thread. I had managed to go to two sepate events, two fine and varied events - Mick Standen's memorial, and samarcand's barbecue party - with a needle dangling from my clothing. If anyone noticed, they didn't mention it.

Comments

[cellio]

Yikes. Glad you didn't poke yourself.

Would some sort of binding tape help keep your seams intact? I'm not a sewer and don't know the right terms and techniques -- but I've seen such. I think the idea is that you encase the edge of the unravelly fabric in it, folding the tape over the edge and then sewing it down through two layers of itself and the cloth in between.)

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Hm, that's a thought. I've used bias binding on hems that tend to unravel - but I don't want to make the seams too solid. Also, as must be obvious, I'm not much of a sewer myself, just a patcher-up!