De-stashing my life

Since my last post, I've been really busy with my goats and in preparing my house for sale. My crafty hands don't like that at all!  However, I was able to complete a baby afghan for a young mom in West Texas. I wanted to display it as I was crocheting it, but didn't want her to suspect it would be hers! Granny squares are sooooo soothing.
 
But the time has come to de-stash my life.

I know, I know, but this time I mean it! We plan to put our house up for sale in early May, so the clock is ticking!

Of course, when I went in the sewing room, I found a stack of jeans that needed repair on top of the sewing cabinet. Rather than jump into the de-stash (stall warning), I decided to repair the jeans first.

 


Working on the ranch can really mess up your jeans with barbed wire and such. Farm clothes get dirty and torn, kinda like 'play clothes' from when I was a kid. Fix the holes, patch the tears, and, voila!, another pair of jeans rejoins the queue. Like most sewing skills, mending has some tricks that ensure a strong, lasting repair. Ah, denim blue.


Here's a quick tutorial. First, stabilize the tear with stay-stitiching. Just a quick straight stitch around the edges prevents further raveling or stretching out of shape.


Trim excess fraying and raveling. However, on work clothes, I leave the warp or woof threads that are still connected at both ends; I only trim the broken ones.


Determine whether to patch and darn from the back, or place a patch on the outside. If the tear is new and the edges meet up reasonably well, I prefer to patch from the back as it generally is less obvious and a lighter weight backing material can be used. Baste the patch in place. Next, I use a multi-stitch zig zag stitch to 'darn' the tears and secure them to the backing fabric. On this repair, I inserted a line of stitching diagonal to the patch to provide strength along the grain of the fabric.




With a top patch, I use similar fabric to cut a patch, making sure its edges will sew into fabric that is not weak. Be sure to match the grain lengthwise to avoid the patch stretching out of shape. In this case, with a patch near the knee, I did a satin stitch edge to secure the edges of the patch from fraying or coming loose.





Wow. I forgot about these jeans! A piece of metal tore a humongous hole in those jeans (and me, too!).



That's it! Four pairs of jeans returned to service! Well worth a half hour of time. One pair was sent to recycle heaven: those jeans were ripped in the crotch and the fabric was nearly worn through. I would have needed to replace the entire seat.  Ain't nobody got time for that!


Ah. Back to de-stashing. I did a quick sort of random yarns, and pulled out odd skeins and weights and made a pile. I offered it free to friends on facebook and got multiple offers in a few minutes. There's some yarn gone! I also packed up all of my sewing patterns (which is a lot after 40+ years). One box done!

Granny's Daughter

When you craft with yarn, you end up with leftover yarn, usually not enough to make anything, but throwing it away seems wasteful.  I either hand roll it into a ball, use my yarn-winder to make a center-pull skein, or leave as-is. I sometimes have a pristine ball of yarn or two left when I finish a project. What I should do is return them to the store for a refund, but I always talk myself out of it or plain forget about it.

Thus a stash begins...

My favorite way to use scraps to make something useful, like an afghan. I have made several "scrapghans," including the one shown in my first post, with light and dark shades of a color, surrounded by black. Last week, while cleaning up the sewing room, I came across a gallon container with little squares in it--Granny's Daughters. Basically, a Granny's Daughter is round one of a Granny Square and uses between 2 and 3 yards of yarn.

About 15 years ago, I received a 3-ring binder 'card' which featured a Granny's Daughter afghan pattern that is one of Vanna's favorites. (Did you know that the most famous letter turner is a mad crochet artist with her own line of yarns?). It was designed by Nancy Fuller and is the same as her pattern on Ravelry. Anyhoo, the offer was to join a club and they would periodically send you a new pattern card, or even win a lapful of yarn! (like I need one...). Vanna: I like the variety of colors in this afghan. It's made of miniature granny squares you can work using bits of leftover yarn from your collection (emphasis mine). Yup, always trying to get you to load up the stash, er, collection.

I never did join the pattern club, but thought using up small scraps would be a "good thing." Thus the jar of granny's daughters has slowly grown over time.

These are so easy and quick and they can be done without looking. Great for TV, travel or anytime you have a minute. This pattern calls for over 800 GDs, so I started working on it and have about 400 ish ready. The major drawback to this pattern is that each tiny GD has two ends which must be woven. Have I said I hate weaving end?  However, I have perfected it and crochet over the tail when making the first 6 dc in the 5 ch ring. When I finish, I just weave that one back the opposite direction and take the final tail and weave it on the opposite side of the ring. Balance, symmetry.

So far I'm proud of myself. I've been weaving tails before they go in the jar, thus avoiding the drudgery of weaving 800 at once. Now I'm just working on the GDs. I can make about one per minute at slow speed, so if I need 400 more, that's a minimum of 6-2/3 hours, PLUS the weaving time (it takes more time to weave than crochet). Add in time to 'balance' the porportion of colors, and I should be ready to progress to the second part of the project by mid-June. I have plenty of white yarn on hand to do the joining, so completing this stash buster will actually free up space!