In my last post, I offered up a list of things I made for Christmas, things that involved studio time but not art-making. I realize now, though I didn’t at the time, that I did so at least partly to explain why you’ve seen so little Shintangle Studio product here in past months. I have a few more such diversions for you today.
As the sewing-machine-owning wife of a horse logger, I’ve found myself on many occasions attempting to mend some unusual and unwieldy fabric things.
- Fallers’ pants are the worst, because they have inserts of Kevlar in the thighs and calves that make repairing a tear in the leg a tricky business. I’m grateful that my dear husband so rarely falls trees anymore that he rarely has to wear fallers’ pants. But after he got back from his stint at Caravan Farm Theatre (see here and here this year, I struggled to mend the ripped pockets in his heavy wool winter trousers (sorry but I’ve just enough English culture in my background that “pants” to me means underpants as much as it does trousers). These trousers are so well-made that I had to contort myself and them quite a bit to get them under the needle, and even then things didn’t go very well.
- And the jeans dh wears for working around here are heavy, double-layer (at least on the thighs) Carhartts and similarly-stiff brands: just mending a tear or patching a hole in these jeans is kind of a production.
- And last spring it was suspenders. Dh likes to wear his jeans with suspenders rather than a belt, but he’s not impressed by the quality of easily-available suspenders, which I think are meant more as fashion accessories than as hard-wearing means to hold up trousers. I bought some suspender elastic at Dressew and with some head-scratching and some swearing, I made him a new set of suspenders, using the hardware from an old pair that had lost all elasticity. I still have another set to replace, but somehow I’m not enthusiastic about it, so until they’re really needed, I’ll probably let it slide.
So I’m used to odd requests for repairs.
Before he left for Caravan, dh came to me with an old pair of horse blankets that were largely in shreds. They’re stored in the tack room up in the barn, where the pack rats have feasted on them. (They also destroy the felt pads that go under the collars, the leather lines and rigging, and anything else that was once fibre or animal hide.) These blankets hadn’t been used in years, but dh felt that this year he wanted to take them to Caravan. Once in full swing, a day’s work at Caravan means three shows, each an hour long, that require the horses to pull pretty hard at times to get the wagons and sleds up slopes and across the field with a full load of twenty passengers. Between shows, the horses stand for an hour. On cold nights, a blanket is a good thing to have, because the horses are sweated up and hot when the show is over and can easily get chilled as they stand. And after the final show, they have to stand for a while until they’re cool enough to be allowed a drink and some hay, so that’s another time when a blanket is a good idea.
Back to these particular blankets.
We had two that matched, with a blue outer layer of something like oilcloth and a grey felted lining. And dh found a third blanket, with a canvas outer layer. “What if,” he asked, “we cut up the third one to patch the others? Would that work?” I didn’t see why it wouldn’t, so we went got down to it.
Here’s the kind of damage we were facing.
What a mess!
And in some places, the lining was missing in large chunks. There was nothing I could do about those spots, and dh said that the important thing was the outer layer, to keep rain and snow off the horses. So we concentrated on the outer layer.
And here’s how things looked after the repairs were complete. Pretty pie-bald, I think you’d have to agree, but perhaps very slightly like a Gee’s Bend quilt?
It’s difficult to give you an idea of the scale involved here. But my cutting table is eight feet long, and one blanket, folded in two as below, stretched nearly the whole length. I was curious enough to measure these blankets: they’re six feet wide by seven feet long. And they fit Oscar and Ivy perfectly. Big horses need big blankets.
Manipulating all that fabric through a domestic sewing machine isn’t easy. It took four hands to keep things in the right place. The risk was having the blanket slide off the table and pull on the sewing machine needle, which is nowhere near strong enough to withstand the weight of all this heavy fabric. So dh sat beside me and took instructions from me about how to move the fabric as I sewed. Thank heavens for the sturdiness of Pfaff sewing machines: mine (a Grand Quilter, now, alas, no longer available) had no trouble handling the density of these fabrics, even in multiple layers.
But the weight of the fabric wasn’t the most dangerous thing to my machine. If you look at the photo above, you can see that the blanket is by no means pristine. In fact, it’s impregnated with years’ worth of horse hair, dust, and sand (the horses like to roll on the ground, our soil is mostly sand, and the sand transfers from horse to blanket). See the floor? Every time we moved a blanket, a new cloud of hair and dust and sand gently lifted into the air. And what ended up in the air and on the floor also ended up inside my machine.
It took nearly as long to get all of this out of the delicate moving parts of the machine as to do the repair job.
Before we were finished, however, we had one more step to complete. The pack rats had attacked not just the blankets but the canvas straps that secured the blankets to the horses. Most of these were missing entirely, so we had to make new ones. My dh asked me what I might have that we could use. “Seat belt webbing,” I said. Years ago he’d given me a roll of this stuff, along with rolls of other kinds of webbing and it had all sat, mostly unused, for probably fifteen years, waiting for just this moment.
Dh cut the old hardware off what straps remained on the two blankets we were restoring and filled in the gaps with the hardware from the third blanket. Miraculously, we had all we needed.
See what I did? I threaded on the hardware and sewed the strap loop shut, then sewed the webbing onto the blanket right next to the original canvas. I copied the sewing pattern, complete with the x pattern for reinforcement.
What a relief it was to finish this job, which required a fair bit of both physical and mental effort. But dh was thrilled, and I felt a glow of satisfaction in saving the blankets from the dump, saving us the expense of buying new ones, and the notion that I was helping Ivy and Oscar stay comfortable. Big win all round.
Do you want to see what I did to clean out my machine? I had a bag of small vacuum accessories made for this kind of situation, and I pulled it out of the cupboard with a flourish, only to discover that the accessories were far too narrow to fit the nozzle of my shop vac. So I cobbled together a fix-it out of painters’ tape.
It worked perfectly. After vacuuming, I went back in with cotton swabs (best thing ever for cleaning out a sewing machine, in my view; better than a little brush because the swabs bring the dirt right out of the machine rather than just spreading it around).
It was while I was using the shop vac with this dandy little attachment to clean out the worst of the muck from the machine that I made a startling discovery. When I turned on the shop vac, a cloud of dust poofed out of the canister. I ignored it at that moment, but after I was done with the vac, I opened it up. And laughed and laughed.
I keep a water dish and a bowl of cat food in the studio because Winston’s getting pretty creaky in his old age and I believe he shouldn’t have to trek all the way back to the house every time he wants a drink or some food. But it was clear, through the summer and particularly into the fall, that the mice were getting more of the food than the cats were. Not only did I find evidence of mouse activity all over the studio (yuck, this is one reason that I keep my fabric in sealed containers), but the bowl was quite often empty in the mornings, with little mousey calling cards left behind in the bottom of the bowl.
Clearly the mice were stocking up for winter. I found some caches of food, notably in my Kleenex box (yuck again), and in a container I use for pencils and so on. But we’re talking about a significant amount of food here. I assumed the mice had taken it elsewhere. But no. The clever things had found a better place to store it.
That’s the canister of the shop vac, with the missing cat food lying on the last shreds of the vacuum bag. No wonder the dust was coming right back out when I turned it on.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that with two cats sharing my studio a lot of the time, I wouldn’t have a mouse problem? Winston was a superb mouser in his youth and middle age, but he’s beyond it now. And Soop has never been a very enthusiastic or successful mouser. She’s more the glamorous cover girl type.
Last week I showed you her helpful participation in studio photography. She was right in the midst of the horse blanket project too, though her role was limited to sitting on tables we needed to use or on the blankets themselves when we were about to move them.
Work with me, darlin'!
As I say, I’m glad to have the horse blanket task done. But I also wanted to tell you that this is not the biggest nor most unwieldy thing I’ve mended on a sewing machine. When I first started spending time with dh, we were camped on his woodlot, using an old Atco trailer as our home base. That trailer got pretty hot in the summer, so after a couple of years dh dug out an old canvas teepee that he and his first wife had made from plans they bought. I have a strong memory of working for hours and hours using a draw knife to peel the fifteen or sixteen poles that dh cut from the bush and brought back to the campsite. It was very satisfying watch the bark peel away as I pulled the knife toward me. Dh whittled pegs from the alder by the creek to lace together the two edges of the teepee above the door. Simple, happy times.
The teepee, sixteen feet across and perhaps twelve to fifteen feet tall, had holes and tears that needed to be mended. We found some heavy canvas somewhere or other and I lugged my little Pfaff Hobbymatic 1122 sewing machine from Vancouver to Greenwood, not quite believing that it would be up to the job. We bought an adapter that allowed me to run the machine off my car, using the cigarette lighter. And I sat at the picnic table dh made, and I mended that teepee. And not just once, either. We used it for a few years, and as the canvas took more of a beating from the sun and rain, it developed more weak spots and tears. We used it as a guest “cottage” after we moved back onto our home place: I remember my sister and her youngest child staying in it, and how enchanted my niece (aged four at the time) was when the kittens (we had eight that year, the only year we’ve had kittens) skittered up the teepee walls when she and her mother were inside. (Winston was one of those kittens; my niece will be twenty next fall). Eventually the teepee more or less fell apart.
I loved sleeping in the teepee. I loved lying in my sleeping bag, looking up at the sky through the smoke hole, seeing the faint light of the moon shining through the canvas. It was a beautiful space, and as much like sleeping outside as it was possible without sleeping right out in the open.
And in case you’re wondering, I still use that old Pfaff. Until last week, when something went haywire with it, it was my Greenwood-Public-Library-raffle-quilt-making machine. I’m still hopeful that I can bring it back into service.
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