After four days of tedious, boring, fiddly mending, I need a project that is fun and creative and enjoyable.

Funnily enough this one I’ve also been thinking about and sort of procrastinating about for a long time, but for completely the opposite reason than the damn cardigan facing, but for the completely opposite reason.

This is an old skirt in some sort of crafts-woven wool mix fabric that I bought at Spitalfields Market ages ago, from a small-scale maker. I still like it but at the same time I feel it’s getting a bit boring. Needs more bling, more pizzazz. So I’ve been thinking about decorating it somehow.

But how? Applique? Lace? Embroidery? Too much wide-open choice, too many options, so I’ve done nothing.

At one point I bought a small bit of glorious patterned silk fabric that I thought I might use for some kind of applique, but it never felt quite right, so the project has been languishing at the back of my brain.

Inspiration is never going to simply appear so I just have to get started. I’m thinking of organic shapes in a vaguely flower-like design, centred around the right side seam. (Sloppy photos today, sorry – I was focusing more on the design than on documenting it properly.)

Going all in on the patterned silk would be too much of a good thing, I think, so I bought wool in matching colours to combine it with. The silk gets to set both the colour scheme and the overall tone – blingy! – but some of the “petals” will be in wool. In a way it will make it visually noisier but also less overwhelming I hope.

Finally I am done with the cardigan and it’s wearable again.

I was expecting two days of work but even working until my eyes got tired and difficult to focus, it took me 4 days to finish it. Never again.

The stiff tape makes all the horizontal edges flare just a little bit. Not too much around the neckline, luckily, and around the hips I think it might actually look good in a way.

The rounded corners were super hard. I figured out after the first one that clips worked better than pins, but it was still difficult to get the curves to curve. I didn’t quite succeed, and they all look a bit uneven. I don’t think it will be noticeable from a distance, though. I’m not going to redo it all in any case.

And of course Nysse had to lie down on it when I was done. He doesn’t even always lay long enough on my projects to go to sleep – sometimes only a few minutes. I don’t know if he just wants to try them out and see how comfy they are, or if he’s marking them as his territory or something.

I generally enjoy mending clothing. Some mending projects are creative, some are meditative, some quick and simple because I just want to get my favourite socks back into rotation.

And then there is this one. I’ve been procrastinating about it for at least a year because I just know it’s going to take forever and not be any fun.

This is a cashmere cardigan from a Hong Kong-based clothing brand. I was going to say it’s a favourite cardigan of mine but really by now I pretty much only have favourite cardigans. It’s the first and pretty much only high-end fashion item I ever bought, way back in London, and was the most expensive piece of clothing I owned for a long time. Taking inflation into account, it still might be. I just loved it from the moment I laid my eyes on it.

I’ve patched the elbows and redone the cuffs already but now the bias tape facing is completely worn through, to the point where it looks so shabby and tatty that I can’t wear it among people.

I have more of the silk fabric I used for the cuff facing. And now I’m on vacation and I have the time. So it’s time to get it done.

The problem with the silk I have is that it’s stiff, and expensive. The normal kind of material to use for facing is bias tape, cut on the diagonal, which makes it easier to shape around curves. But buying enough of the silk to cut bias tape from it would be horrendously expensive, so I have to just use normal horizontal strips. Which are being the opposite of supple and flexible here. Stiff as a stick.

And it’s so many tiny stitches. Two and a half metres, I measured the whole facing to. It’s going to take forever.

I’d be willing to throw it out and buy a new one if I could, but they don’t even make this model any more, or anything close to it, so even that isn’t an option. Just grit my teeth and get it done.

Having made three casual summer dresses all from the same pattern, making one more with sleeves (for cold season, office use) didn’t feel difficult at all. Now I wish I’d taken a close-up photo of the fabric, though. It looks nice from this distance but the colours and the pattern are stunning up close.

I was going to sew but Nysse felt like asserting his territorial claim over the materials on the dining table.

The darning here is basically rebuilding the towel, and from a practical point of view it’s probably not worth the effort, but it’s very meditative work.

Not bad! Took me most of the weekend, but it came out pretty nice. Incredibly soft and comfy, almost makes me want to cuddle with it. A few slightly uneven seams here and there, but nothing that anyone will notice without a very close inspection. My top-stitching is never as even as I’d like, and it was extra tricky with a floppy fabric that would not stay as folded.

I could probably have had it finished in half the time if I hadn’t decided on flat felled seams. But they’re going to feel so much nicer, and be more durable as well.

The internet, by the way, is full of tutorials for felled seams; there are endless numbers of sewing tutorials out there and felled seams are a popular topic, I guess, because they look so professional but aren’t actually difficult. But those tutorials all stick to the basics and I couldn’t find a single one that covered more advanced topics – such as, how do you sew the meeting of two felled seams? I don’t know if it’s because no sewing expert has written about it, or because Google has gone to the dogs. Which it definitely has; it used to be possible to force the search to include every word in my query but now Google just ignores what I type and goes for the most popular results. “Hey, I know you typed something else, but how about you read this thing instead, I think you’ll like it better.” No, I don’t.

Where my felled seams meet, they sort of fall all over each other and get a bit tangled, but it’s all hidden anyway so that’s OK.

Why do my felled seams need meet each other, anyway? A simple dressing gown just has some straight armhole and side seams, right?

That would have been true if I had just followed the pattern. Unfortunately the pattern I bought looked good on the sketch but that turned out to be an “artist’s impression” only, and reality was different. Like the “artist’s impressions” of proposed new city squares that are all sunny and have trees in little containers and happy young people walking around, and by the time reality arrives the trees are gone and in their places there are garbage bins.

In the sketch the dressing gown was clearly wider towards the bottom and had a nice wide overlap in the front. In reality the body was all straight lines, which was the one thing that I did not want. I am never going to trust another pattern from Svenska Mönster again.

The way the pattern pieces fit on the fabric, I couldn’t easily make them wider, so I added extra pieces in the side seams. (I’ve now learned that the technical term for these is “godet”.) The result is maybe not as sleek as it could have been, but it definitely fits me better. If godets were good enough for the tunic of the Bocksten Man, they’re good enough for me as well.

It was rather satisfying to have filled my need for comfortable summer dresses, so I’m bravely embarking on the next project.

For years now I’ve wanted a nicer light-weight dressing gown. My current one is shiny and glossy and looks almost unworn after fifteen years of use – but it achieves all of that because it’s 100% polyester and feels like plastic against my skin. And it’s too short – I can walk around in it, but not lounge on the sofa without feeling half-naked.

It’s one of those problems that simmers in the background and never becomes urgent. I’ve ordered two potential replacements from a second-hand marketplace; both came with their own problems and ended up donated to a charity shop. Mostly due to fit: standard dressing gowns are straight in shape, which makes them gape around the knees as soon as I move around. And the problem remained.

Sewing those dresses was maybe not the most fun I’ve had, but the results were good. How much harder can a dressing gown be? Last week I went fabric shopping again, and found this beautifully soft double gauze. It caught my eye as soon as I entered the store – the light-weight summer cottons were displayed right on the counter – and nothing else could compare. Of course it turned out to be more than twice the price of the other gauzy cottons… Now the result will have to last me another fifteen years. Although since it’s cotton rather than polyester, it might actually wear out with time.

I’m making progress on darning the linen kitchen towel. I can only work on it during daylight hours (which I had today, because I worked from home and it is summer so it’s full daylight still at five in the afternoon) and even then it’s a task that definitely requires glasses.

Putting on glasses is still weird. I feel like I see well without them, and then putting them on suddenly makes everything almost insanely crisp and sharp. Like a camera in HDR mode, almost unreal.

When I first converted to making and wearing hand-knitted socks, I aimed for colours that would harmonize with other things I was wearing. Then I threw in just a couple of colourful pairs because the yarns looked amazing. For wearing at home, or perhaps to the office on Fridays.

Over time I’ve come to love the crazier socks more and more. The pink ones that at first looked garish now don’t even stand out any more. The more colour, the happier they make me. (These are made with Zauberball Crazy.)

There’s a brand of socks called Happy Socks; Adrian loves them. Mine are even happier.

And I realized after a while that nobody at work cares about the colour of my socks, so now I wear the colourful ones to the office as often as the mood strikes me, without thinking twice.