Wednesday, Time to Sew

It’s Wednesday. It’s time to get out the sewing basket. There’s a stack of mending waiting by the rocking chair – holes in socks to be darned, cuffs of pants to be tacked back in place, buttons to be sewn back on shirts and blouses, loose hems to be whipped down, and, if my grandmother Alice is doing the mending, as she often did, the cuffs of my shorts to be let down. She didn’t approve of young girls showing their legs and did everything she could to lengthen my shorts.

Interesting isn’t it, how the difficulty of the labor tapers off as midweek arrives? Doing the wash on Monday is hard labor and Tuesday ironing requires standing all day in one place, but Wednesday the homemaker gets to sit a spell. If the mending doesn’t take too long she may have time to work on the afghan she is crocheting before starting supper.

My 2014 Wednesday is sewing day, too, although I seldom have mending to do. I’ve given up darning the holes in socks and relegated them to the rag box. Modern washers don’t pop buttons off like the old wringer washers did, so I seldom have a button to sew on. Making my own clothes is a thing of the past. I sometimes do minor alterations, such as shortening Dennis’s pants that were too long, but mostly I sew for pleasure.

Today I’m making Alison’s potholders. I’m making them of faux chenille, using the slash cutting method. First I stacked four layers of 7” fabric squares on top of a batting square and, at the bottom, another fabric square. Next I sewed channels diagonally on each stack, 3/8” apart.

Then I cut down the center of each channel of the top three fabric squares. Because the channels run on the bias of the fabric the cut fabric will curl up without fraying. Already the hint of chenille appears, but they will not achieve their full look until the potholders have been washed and dried.

The only task left is binding the potholder edges. I’ll cut the binding from the sleeve of the old shirt I used to make the potholder squares.

That’s enough about Wednesday, Sewing Day. I have to get to work on the binding.

Copyright 2014 by Shirley Domer