So, I’ve moaned about the bag of doom several times – a bag of thrifted stuff that either needs to be dry-cleaned or mended. I debated a few weeks ago what really needed dry-cleaning and what didn’t.

I obviously couldn’t get everything in the bag of doom professionally cleaned and/or mended. As my mom said, “That’ll cost you a hundred quid!” (My mom is British but has lived in America for twenty-five years – I can only conclude that the shock of the bag of doom caused her to lapse into an expression like “quid”.)

 

So my friend Cyberbelle (owner of Etsy store extraordinaire) came over and gave me some advice. We went through the items one by one, and she came to some valuable conclusions:

• I could, as I suspected, handwash all the skirts in the bag of doom. “All your nice skirts are in here!” she said.
• There was a shirt lost in the bag of doom that didn’t even belong there–nothing was wrong with it. Why did it end up there? It’s a mystery. “I swear it was missing a button!” I said to Cyberbelle, who just gave me a funny look. Um.  Yeah. I’m just going to pretend to myself that this sort of thing happens to everyone. Anyway — yay! I can clean it and wear it again.
• Zippers are tricky jerks — many items in the bag were there because of zippers. Cyberbelle concluded that my two dresses with jacked-up zippers were beyond her expertise and I should get those professionally fixed.
• However, one of my skirts simply had a zipper that was ripped away from its seam:

Which Cyberbelle felt confident we could fix.

Another entry in the bag of doom was a jumpsuit with tiger faces on it, which I bought for a dollar at Speedway Outlet. The jumpsuit–as with the romper and leggings before it–is a fashion piece I disdained, until I saw the tiger-faced-jumpsuit for a dollar and just had to have it.

The problem is that it really needs straps of some kind — it’s old and just doesn’t stay up.

So, we had our mending projects: a seam and some straps.

And I only had to take TWO dresses to be dry-cleaned/zipper-fixed. So I managed to reduce the bag of doom down to two items. The bag of doom is no more!

Now, of course, I’m faced with the task of actually learning how to mend. Cybele and I went on an educational (for me) trip to buy black thread and straps (either bra straps or some kind of ribbon or elastic) for the jumpsuit.

I discovered that

• It’s often difficult to find exactly what you want. We went to Joann’s fabrics and to Michaels and still didn’t successfully find the right kind of straps (“This happens with mending projects,” Cyberbelle cautioned. “See? I told you I was too lazy for this!” I countered, adding, “Can we go get coffee? I’m tired.”).
• There’s a lot of choice. This was only part of the selection of thread available at Joann’s:

If Cyberbelle hadn’t been with me, I would have been overwhelmed. This is worse than all the different kinds of peanut butter at the Supermarket! Luckily, she guided me towards some basic, cheap black thread, which I purchased.

So, next week, we’re going to have a Stitch ‘N Bitch, where she comes over – along with any other friends that have mending projects – and we’re going to chat and Cyberbelle’s is gonna teach me how to do some basic sewing. We’ll see how I do.

Image via mothgirlwings.tumblr. Screenshot from Disney’s Cinderella, released 1950.