[Also that yarn might have been hand-spun from wool taken from the farm's sheep.]
Posted on 02/18/2019 10:41:14 AM PST by Daffynition
I was folding away some laundry the other day when I noticed a hole in my J. Crew sweatshirt. It’s about the size of my pinky nail, but threatens to get bigger, and it’s located in the very inconvenient place of my sweatshirt’s collar band. “I should mend that,” I thought, until I realized I don’t know how to mend anything at all.
The idea of mending today feels more like a promise than a reality. Alden Wicker touched on this last month in her Vox article about how the spare button represents all the ways we fail to be good consumers. Everyone has a stash of spare buttons rattling around in some drawer, with each button still neatly tucked inside its original packaging until we gather the will to throw it away. We buy things because they’re supposedly “investment pieces” and “classics,” but when it comes time to actually take care of our clothes, we don’t actually know how – or, more often, can’t be bothered.
(Excerpt) Read more at dieworkwear.com ...
My mom's got a few shortcomings, but I'll give her credit where credit is due. She made darn sure her five boys had their domestic skills down pat before they came of age.
My brothers and I all taught our wives basic household skills when we were first married.
Money is money. I cannot see throwing out something I can fix. I can fix anything that needs sewing, darning, glueing, nailing, screwing, painting, etc. You go whine about stereotypes; I'll pocket the money I save and the satisfaction I get from doing it myself.
Their idea of cooking is tossing a frozen meal into a microwave.
“Nothing more pathetic than a man sitting on the couch in his underwear eating a bowl of cereal because he can’t fix a decent meal for himself or work the laundry to wash his clothes.”
Sounds like the start of a good weekend to me. :P
(As for the clothing repair, yah ... haven’t done that in a couple of decades.)
Can't stitch together a small hole in a sweatshirt? Can you get anymore useless?
Now, I'm not going to tailor a nice 3-piece suit, or a bridal gown, anytime soon. In fact, I'm pretty inept with a sewing needle. However, I can put a few stitches in a piece of clothing. And if a person had never done it before...ever, not once....I think that even someone with a room-temp IQ could figure it out.
I wore larges, cause I was stylin’. I still have some heavy sweaters from middle school that still swallow me, and come out when it gets really cold.
It is heavy, ugly sweaters that help get me through these Northeastern winters!
Who needs to mend clothes? Just work them over with the old Bedazzler until they are so sparkly nobody will notice the holes!
I learned how to cook and sew as a kid, still do mend clothes now and then or replace buttons. In the military when the other guys found out I could sew all of a sudden I had a bunch of pairs of pants to hem, I think I made it to a little over a dozen anyway, and told them to bug off, I’ve had enough. I can sew by hand or machine, have several pants now that need hemming, but machine we have is on the fritz, breaks thread no matter what I do. I hate to hem pants by hand...I did all the slacks for my mother’s dry cleaning/alteration shop in the late 70’s. She would measure, mark and cut, hand it to me and I’d iron and sew. I did a hundred or more that year, 1st time I’d ever tried a blind stitch machine.
I’ve been cooking since I was around 5, which was 1960, (toast and badly fried eggs) one of my nieces won’t touch a pizza unless I make it. Her sister would take grandpa and the kids to Pizza Hut, the only thing she would eat was a salad, maybe a breadstick or two. I never knew this till I was around 50.
I still cook daily (live alone), learning to make ravioli now, but I’ve been making bread, including sourdough, since I was in high school, (learned sourdough later though), started on pizza in the 80’s while helping my sister raise 2 girls, also into making quiche, chili, custard, a great chocolate pie...all sorts of stuff many men can barely even spell...I make a cheesecake that’s hard to beat...that reminds me, I have the stuff in the fridge...hmmmm
[Also that yarn might have been hand-spun from wool taken from the farm's sheep.]
When I observed the crop of girls, growing up as contemporaries of my three sons, I made it a point to teach them how to sew on a button; use a sewing machine; do laundry, iron, and how too cook simple meals; how to clean a firearm and sight in a rifle.
Like you, they made *good catches.*
Schools used to teach home ec and shop. Now it may be more rare, depending on the district.
Life skills; parents today, didn’t get them growing up and have nothing to hand down to their progeny. They only know how to order take-out.
Heh. I have a box in my drawer of all the *spare* buttons you get when you buy a shirt; along with thread to repair a sweater item.
Kids buy clothes with huge holes ‘worn’ in them on purpose, these days it’s in style.
I don’t know why.
It looks silly.
Of course! From the era of the *Clapper* and fountain pens. :)
Yeah, that.
That’s b/c the Kardashians do it.
Escapes me why you would spend a lot of money for designer jeans with holes in them.
I went on a date once with a guy like this. He mentioned the only thing in his refrigerator was bread he bought in bulk and kept frozen in the freezer. He was looking for somebody to be his cook and housekeeper. The man was over 40 years old, had never been married, and had never learned to do these things for himself. I could not get out of there fast enough.
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