DO YOU LIKE DOING HOUSEHOLD MENDING?

Mmmmmm……I wonder if you dislike mending as much as I do? It just does not do it for me in terms of creativity….feels more like a chore.  However, having the skills to repair household items can be a real advantage and certainly can save you a bunch of $$$.

This was what remained of the edging of the bath mat after a “quarrel” with the washing machine?!

You can imagine that I groaned inwardly a few months ago when hubby said that the edging around the bath mat had come away from the bathmat and it was all frayed and ugly. My first instinct was to toss it into the garbage & go buy a new one. But then a teeny thought entered my brain: “That is going to end up in the landfill”  followed by “I wonder IF I can fix it?” So it became a sort of challenge to myself.

I set about cutting away as much of the frayed mess around the edge as possible. I must confess that I made an even bigger mess….on the floor……but that is what vacuum cleaners are for – right?

I chose to try to repair the edge of the mat with fold over elastic. Sage green would have been far nicer but I don’t even know if sage green fold over elastic exists and I have tons of the white……so white it was! Clover clips were just the thing for this task (don’t you just love Clover clips?) Took a while and I used up almost my entire box of Clover clips ensuring the elastic was well & truly “pinned” in place. I overlapped the join which ended up a little thick & bunchy but my “mending tolerance” was wearing rather thin by that point.

The fold-over elastic was actually a good choice as it was flexible and went real smoothly around the curved corners. (A bias tape would have been another option). Notice in the above pic that I sewed from the back/underside as I did not want the rubberized underside of the bath mat to stick to the bed of the sewing machine & be a “problem child” as I sewed and fed that rather thick edge freely through my Janome Horizon MC8900. The shaggy side of the mat was just fine and did not hinder that process. I am going to confess (again) that this did take a while. It was not a job I could rush. If I had to grade this for skill level, I would say Intermediate:  It did require a mid level sewing knowledge, patience, time and the right tools.

Tools?

1. I used the Janome Acufeed Flex foot (seen in pic above). I used the single dual feed VD foot. But the larger AD Acufeed foot would also have worked. I would never have attempted this task with a regular sewing foot – way too thick and too many layers. A regular white walking foot would be the very least I would have considered using.
2. I used strong polyester thread for this heavy duty task.
3. I also used the extra presser foot lift to get the bulky edge under the presser foot before lowering the Acufeed flex presser foot in place – very helpful indeed and this is one of the features I use frequently on this popular Janome Horizon MC8900 model.
4. I chose to use the serpentine stitch as I am just so not into extra fiddling to make a straight line straight and sewn in the perfect spot. No way I invite “trouble” into my mending when I’m not wild about doing it in the first place?! …..much easier and prettier to use the Serpentine stitch.

Janome Horizon MC8900 screen showing the popular stitch #99 in the Quilt menu that I selected with settings of SW7.5 and SL1.1

Patience and perseverance won out……I was happy with my repaired bath mat.

I used a matching green thread for the stitching so it “toned” down the white edge a bit.

Not perfect but he who does the grocery shopping and cooking was most pleased……saved $$$….and I was super impressed, once again, about how our Janome machines and Acufeed flex system just breeze through tough tasks we might be discouraged from attempting.                    Blame the photographer…..the mat IS actually a rectangle – There was no accident with the scissors?!