A Stitch in Time

I learned to sew when I was a kid - starting out on a treadle sewing machine making clothes for my dolls. I progressed to making clothes for myself in my teens and although I don't sew clothes now I have skills that are useful for keeping clothes in good repair, altering them to fit and saving money.

Today I have done some mending and hemming of school trousers, sewn on buttons and repaired some pleating on a dying school kilt that only has to last 2 more school terms. I have also replaced a zip - slightly more challenging. This jacket was given to us by friends for my son for his football club uniform but it had seams coming apart at the armpits and a broken zip. For $10 for a new zip and some time spent unpickiing and sewing in a new zip myson now has an as-new jacket which will hopefully last the season - if he will just stop growing!

I have repaired clothes of my own that have sat in my mending pile for a long time. I bought myself a shirt many months ago that I have only worn once as a button fell off it. I didn't have any thread to match it so it took a while for me to get near a shop where I would remember to buy some thread. By that stage I had lost the excitement of it being a new shirt and it languished on my mending pile along with some other items I had to repair.

Now these are all little jobs on their own but as the pile accumulates it starts to be a job that would require some effort on my part to sit and do. Today I finally got around to doing them! With the buttons sewn on and hems repaired I realised as I finished each one and put it back in my wardrobe that some of the clothing items in the pile I had almost forgotten I owned. It felt like I was getting something new back in my wardrobe - the new shirt I had bought got back its sense of newness again too because it really was new!

It got me thinking. One of my favourite sayings is "a stitch in time saves nine" and I often apply it to things in life where I can see that if things are left they become bigger and more of a hassle than if you just get on and do them. Repairing things when you see they need it often saves a bigger repair down the track. I know with my mending pile if I had done each item as I had seen it needed doing then the job would not have become so much bigger. As a result it was preventing me from taking the time to sit and do it. I have done it now and feel pleased I did.

This year I am going to try to make the effort to do things at the time I see they need doing (where possible) and stop procrastinating. The energy I put into thinking about the things I need to do and the energy those things take up by being in places in my house where they don't live (I often leave things out as a reminder to make me do them - they just become clutter that I shuffle around!) is wasted energy. I am determined to do "that stitch in time" and see if I feel lighter and have more space to do the things I want to do. Let's see how I go!