The Colour Collaborative: July: Mend

For someone who likes hand sewing as much as I do, mending seems to take an awfully long time to get done in this house. Shirts and cardigans lie at the bottom of the ironing pile for weeks as they wait for buttons to be stitched back on, school jumpers and trousers sit scrunched up and forgotten in my yarn basket while I muster up the necessary enthusiasm to sew up a hole or tear. And as for darning socks - does anyone even do this? 

However, I have previously patched jeans that have torn on the knee and I did enjoy this, partly because when - as a nearly six foot tall woman - you find a pair of jeans that fit you well, you want to hang on to them for as long as possible. 

I like the kind of mending where you can improve something by stamping your own individuality on it. I have a really nice white linen top that I never wore because I didn't like the gold buttons. So I cut them all off and sewed on mother of pearl ones and now I wear it to work as soon as it's out of the wash.

It's not technically repairing really, but when the kids were small and money very tight, I used to buy them plain supermarket t-shirts and applique on my own designs and I'd sometimes sell them at craft fairs too. In fact I still make the kids t-shirts now, like when Angus wanted a badger t-shirt for his recent birthday and there were none to be found anywhere. 

But what I really love is the other kind of mending; not necessarily fixing something or putting it back together, but restoring a thing. Redecorating, revamping, renovating, improving - making something more than it was before. Now that I do like. 

Things like painting an unloved pine dressing table...

...or customising an IKEA bedside table...

...or painting and lining an old suitcase I bought on eBay.

I especially love to try and repurpose something I've found in a skip or charity shop or car boot sale, and make something new and lovely from it. 

This pink floral bed linen has been turned into a cover for a cushion and an ironing board and I have lots more plans for it still.

And I have plans for these charity shop pillow cases too. (More cushion covers because, you know, we really, really need more cushions in this house...)

And remember that wall paper I found down at the tip?

It was a joy to clean it up and use it in a project and every time I open those drawers I smile.

I'm not interested in things matching in the house - if anything, I find overly colour-matched interior design quite oppressive - but the colours below are all ones I seem to choose time and time again: mustard yellow, dusty pink, deep blue, off-white, olive green, grey.

I didn't seek them out, it's more that we kind of found each other.

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Don't forget to visit the other Colour Collaborative blogs for more of this month's posts, just click on the links below:

Annie at Annie Cholewa

Sandra at Cherry Heart

Jennifer at Thistlebear

Claire at Above The River

Sarah at Mitenska

What is The Colour Collaborative? 

All creative bloggers make stuff, gather stuff, shape stuff, and share stuff. Mostly they work on their own, but what happens when a group of them work together? Is a creative collaboration greater than the sum of its parts? We think so and we hope you will too. We'll each be offering our own monthly take on a colour related theme, and hoping that in combination our ideas will encourage us, and perhaps you, to think about colour in new ways.