Visible Mending

Those who know me reasonably well, or have followed me on IG (Instagram) & to a lesser amount on FB (Facebook), no doubt already know that I like to mend items. I have been doing it for years, mostly for us, but every so often I will do so for others too. I particularly enjoy mending that isn’t trying to be entirely invisible too. When you mend something, you are adding to the story that it carries. Making that story more apparent to everyone who see’s it, is actually a lot of fun. Of course with mending, often comes increased lifespan, which is really important, especially if you are trying to live in a more sustainable way, as my family is.

What follows is a mending project that came about with a simple message & an image.

A couple of weeks back I received what was described as a CRIME SCENE pic. I recall laughing as I waited for the picture to upload via FB Messenger & then let out a gasp so audible, that my youngest came over to see what I was looking at. Crime Scene pic was definitely accurate.

The toy (a treasured possession of her son’s) was a cat, called Floppy, who had, had an unfortunately incident with a family pet, ironically a dog. I didn’t want to promise anything, but I said I would have a look & see what I could do.

I mentioned that I couldn’t match the fabrics exactly, but as I had made a set of memory scrappies for their family & still had the fabric available, I could perhaps use that to mend Floppy? At which point, I was offered some baby blankets & clothes that had been kept of her son’s, to incorporate if I could, instead, which was absolutely perfect.

I lost count of the times that I took Floppy out of his little plastic bag to peruse the damage & build up the courage to mend him. A little boys treasured toy, was in my possession to fix. He had already been told that Floppy would be different, but his mum had told him that if anyone could do it, she thought that Miss Eva would be the one. So, clearly failure was not an option (hahaha). With each moment spent looking at him, confidence grew, as did a plan of action. One just had to just get over the initial shock.

I had been sent a picture of Floppy’s “brother” a rabbit, which helped greatly, because at least from that, I knew the general shape to aim for. I cut up a couple of the baby blankets given to me and set to creating a pattern. It took a bit of fiddling around, but once I felt that I had a big enough piece of fabric, I tacked it in place with some black thread & then used a quilting pen to outline where the edge of Floppy was in relation to the fabric. I would then use those markings to refer back to when the fabric was pulled out. That way I could trim the fabric a little more to create an actual pattern rather than have too much extra fabric tucked up inside. I chose black thread, because it would be easier to see, snip & remove.

Here are a couple of pictures of the tacking. I didn’t take any pictures of the piece that I inserted before it was sewn in either time, but this gives a bit of an idea of what I’m talking about.

As you can see in the pictures above, he was starting to look whole again. I carefully unpicked a section of the pattern, included a piece of fabric from a little top, cut out the shape required from the new piece to be inserted, ironed on some interfacing to give the fabric more stability (& hopefully increase lifespan) & sewed it all up by hand. This time, I did so with a matching thread colour, to the main colour of Floppy. The extra tears (from teeth) were simply sewn together with the matching thread. I didn’t cut flaps of “fur” only added fabric to Floppy where needed, to make him whole again.

I’m so happy that I was able to revive this little guy, he has a bit of extra character to him, which I really like. Mending Floppy has added to the story that he carries & I hope that his little owner loves him at least as much as he did before.

Here are few pictures of the end result. What do you think?