The witch hazel is blooming.

I have a favourite cardigan with very worn buttonholes. The yarn around the buttonholes was worn all the way through and the knitted fabric was starting to unravel completely.

I don’t enjoy sewing buttonholes. It’s fiddly and tedious.

One of my mending books spends several pages on a technique for mending buttonholes with a small patch of fabric. It looks clever and tidy and sturdy:

Despite the illustrations, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around how it actually works. Topologically it just does not make sense. You cannot take a rectangular, flat piece of fabric and fold it inside out through a slit, and have all of it still lay flat.

I tried it out anyway, assuming it would make sense when I held it all in my hands. Maybe the fabric would somehow settle into tidy folds. Nope. Not even near. No matter how much I tried to smooth it and flatten it and gather it into pleats, it just bunched up and pulled on itself. I couldn’t even get it flat enough to sew the edges down. Completely hopeless.

So it’ll have to be the old school way after all. I reinforced the button band with a strip of fabric that I sewed onto the rear of it, and now I’m sewing the buttonhole edges one at a time. The front looks pretty good but the reverse, not so much. Luckily nobody will be looking at that side. Also luckily I don’t have to finish all the buttonholes before I can wear the cardigan again. They’re boring, so I’m doing them one at a time. Four done, which is enough to make it usable.

We finally have more dumbbells! The whole project only took 5 weeks and three attempts.

It really bothers my sense of order that I have three different styles among four pairs of dumbbells. Nothing is consistent! One pair in painted cast iron, three covered in vinyl. One pair measured in pounds, three in kilograms. Two pairs out of four match, and those two are not adjacent in size. Eugh.