This shirt from my mending pile is really appropriate for today’s prompt. The stains on it are clear silicon caulk, which got stuck on one day while I was caulking the bathroom faucet. At one point I decided to make this shirt a chore shirt, but then when it got caulked I regretted that decision. And now today I’ve made an effort to repair it, as it also has a couple of tears, one in the armhole and one on the cuff.
Since the damage is extensive, I just did the best I could. One mistake I made was using tencel thread, (2 of them) held together. It’s very slippery thread and that made the mend even more difficult. I persisted though, and covered every major caulk stain.
Here’s the shirt before the mend:
To begin this mend I set up the target area in an embroidery hoop. With knit fabric this thin, it’s hard to get high tension though, but it’s better than nothing:
I honestly wasn’t sure how to approach this mend, so I just went with the flow. I knew that I wanted to cover the stains so I went straight for that. I began by lashing on a left/right weft:
This didn’t quite work out the way I wanted because, as I mentioned earlier, the tencel thread is all slip and no grip. This made it really difficult to do a basic weave patch mend. The caulk itself was hard to stitch through at the thickest points; it gave the needle a lot of resistance. Because of this I found myself working from the outside first and slowly working my way in. This meant stitching the worst parts last, and sometimes the coverage wasn’t enough, so I had to just keep recovering the entire area.
Here’s the finished mend:
I think it kinda looks like a person at the top throwing some food to a dino head at the bottom that has it’s mouth open, XD
At least the stains are covered! Next is repairing the armhole tear and the cuff. I’ll save that for another day of this event.
Sewcoordinated 