Making Good: Weaving Embroidery Mending . Geometric Forms

I am so honored to be invited again by the wonderful Agatha from Green Issues by Agy to jump on board her new blogging train: Making Good.

And so, I have this favorite sports skort (skirt + shorts combo) of mine which has served me well over the past half a decade. It is so well-worn that unsightly tears are starting to show up...

I have been itching to try this intriguing weaving + embroidery technique which I have seen on Pinterest. It is originally a darning technique but tweaked to be used on woven fabrics.

I quickly did up a sampler to get a feel of how the technique works as well as to decide the weight of thread that I wanted to use.

I finalized on using a double-stranded needle with a single strand of DMC embroidery thread. The process was tedious but the end results were quite cool!

Materials and tools used are embroidery hoop,  DMC embroidery threads, mending patch, embroidery needle and a pair of scissors.

I got this mending patch from Daiso to act as a stabilizer. But, alas, it wasn't the most pleasant material to work with on my light-weight skort fabric.

In hindsight, I should have just used pieces of light-weight cotton (serged on the edges) as my stabilizers.

I selected some muted colors (pretty close in color value to the gray base of my skort) for the embroidery threads since I am going for a more subtle look (lest I made a glaring bad mistake which will stand out like a sore thumb) .

I first patched the holes with the Daiso mending patch.

I stretched the section which I wanted to embroider on with the embroidery hoop. Then, I drew in the shapes (with a water and air erasable pen) which would eventually be darned over.

Once the major holes are ment, I slowly built up the design with more embroidery and weaves.

And here is the final result!

On me

Here is a little video demonstration that I have made to show the basic concept of surface darning (weaving + embroidery). Enjoy! (I've used a single-threaded needle here instead. And looks like I have accidentally mispelt 'straighten'... Oops..!)

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The very creative Yaney went beyond thinking outside of the box and made herself a spanking new pair of insoles for her shoes with a common material which one might not even think of! Do check her post out!

Next in the line of this blog train will be Karen from Rude Record. She is big on living in a frugal manner and her life is revolving around thrifting, upcycling and refashioning without losing style! Can't wait to see her project!

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This post is part of a blog train hosted by Agatha from Green Issues by Agy on "Making Good". What is repair, and why do we even bother to repair the things we have?  Some see repair as a way of reconnecting with our possessions as we extend their lives. Others see it as a form of creative potential and an avenue to express their craft.  The rewards for mending varies from feeling immense satisfaction to prolonging the life of the product. Follow the “Making Good” blog train this month and see what we have repaired and reconnected with. Have you mended anything today?

Hey, My Mum Let Me Keep 'em!

My mum wasn't big on hoarding things. (Let's face it. She has extreme OCD. XB said I have x% of her OCD syndrome, but unfortunately, I also have the hoarding syndrome.) Before I got married and had my own apartment, my mum would make it a point to "force" my brother and I to clean out our rooms every end of the year (and that would include hilarious threats!). That said, she allowed us to keep some items that are of great sentimental value to us, though she threw out some of my stuffs (including drawings done when I was a kid...) when I shifted! Sadness.

Let's start from the oldest items that I have managed to keep.

Nostalgic much? I think I had these books when I was in kindergarten or Primary one... That would make them more than 25 years old! I remember enjoying looking at the instructions of the watercolor how-to book for ages even though I didn't dare to request my mum for a watercolor palette. The origami book was very well used though (maybe origami papers were cheaper than watercolor). Back then, I would sneak unfinished origami pieces in the pages, hoping one day I would finish them when I understood the instructions fully. I was one weird child..

If you were born in the early 80s in Singapore, then these shouldn't be strange to you!

The infamous Young Scientist badges that we could attain in Primary school if we finished a set number of tasks for a particular badge. Actually, I kept the certificates while my mum has my badges in her scroll of badges... (Hey! Found something that my mum hoards!) I remember everyone in my class started with the Young Botanist badge. I then went on in my upper Primary years getting the Young Ornithologist (not my favorite) and Young Astronomer (something that I love since young, though I've moved on to enjoying the astrophysics part of things more) badges.

Okay, for the next folder of items... Laugh all you want, guys...

My personal collection of cut-out lyrics from "星期五周报"... "星期五周报" (literally translated to Friday's Weekly Papers) was our weekly Chinese educational papers for the Primary school students (usually those taking Chinese as their mother tongue). We were encouraged to buy them and read the articles/do the Chinese exercises , but most often than not, we would skip to the last page and find out what the lyrics of the week were. Those were the days!

Back in those days, we did not have the luxury of smart devices and social media, and once we'd graduated from Primary school, it wasn't as easy to get in touch with one another, unless we got into the same Secondary school. But we had something else to remember the fond memories we had with one another.

Months before our PSLE, most girls (and the occasional boys) would invest in autograph books just to get fellow classmates/schoolmates to write in them. Usually, one would write their profile and then a short poem (who came up with this first 'template', no one knows).  Looking at all those 'cliche' poems really chalks up some memories.

When I got to Secondary school, I took up Girl Guides as my extra curricular activity. I still keep the full set of uniform till this day!

As the saying goes.. Once a Guide, always a Guide! Even 2 decades later. :P

As I've mentioned earlier, my mum discarded all my very old artworks. However, as I got into my teens, I decided to keep a folder of my own proper drawings (the drawings are less than 20 years old, but I guess I'll still post them here..).

During my Primary school days, I love drawing human figures. Not your usual stocky round faced character with 2 scary blob eyes that was taught to kids back in those days, but the normal proportionate ones.

It then, for some reason, progressed into portrait drawing. I didn't have any formal art training (maybe except for still life drawing in my Sec 1 and 2 art classes?), so everything was pretty much trial and error. When the magic of internet was born during my JC days, I finally managed to search through the web and learnt a thing or two about figure drawing as well as manga drawing.

The above are a few of my portrait drawings (Inuyasha made it to my portrait drawing list!) starting from left: Agents Scully and Mulder (1995), Taylor Hanson (1998), Zac Hanson (2000), Inuyasha(2003).

The current me is still meddling with art but I have sort of shifted my artistic focus to more stylistic and abstract kind of work. I really enjoy injecting unexpected elements into my pieces nowadays.

And so, here ends my mini life story of the items that managed to slip through my mum's scrutiny and be kept in my memory box. :)

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This post is part of a blog train hosted by Agatha from Green Issues by Agy on "I Didn't Throw It Away".

We have become such a throw-away society, but there are some things in our households that we still keep. Why is that so? Perhaps this blog train can unlock the reasons behind it! Follow the daily posts on this blog train and read about the stories behind the things we have kept for many years and why we didn't throw them away.

Tomorrow, Hello, Mrs Tan will be sharing with us her very own story about the items she still lovingly keeps. So hop on over to her blog to know more about it!