When I was in my 20s I had an old house and a co-worker who had a similarly old house a couple of blocks away. We were fixing them up as best we could (we didn't have $1.2 million reno budgets like these 20-somethings on HGTV and had to do all the work ourselves). At work we would share our war stories from the previous night's efforts. After some time we discovered Cooper's Law of DIY Projects: anything you think will take five minutes will take you all weekend and any project you set aside an entire weekend to do will take no more than two hours.
So far, pretty much all of my sewing projects I expect to take me several days each. And, so far, most of them have. Some have taken three years and still aren't done. . . In my defense, our outdoor cushions are perfectly serviceable. We just don't care for the pattern/colors. It’s not like I need to re-cover them. But, I feel compelled to reward my wife's patience while I figure things out and get more confident. Stuff takes longer when you have no idea what you’re doing.
I did have a very simple little project pop up recently which I decided to try last night before bed. I have a lawn vacuum with a bag that I wear on my back. It's just one of those leaf blowers that can be converted to a leaf sucker. The bag/backpack serves its purpose well enough: it holds the leaves I suck up with the leaf sucker. It's not the most comfortable thing to wear when it's warm out but it wouldn't be worth the effort to add spacer mesh or anything fancy. (Although I might try playing with some spacer mesh some day when I'm bored.) What the bag really needed, though, was some way to hang it up in my tool shed. I could hang it by the shoulder straps, and that’s what I’ve been doing. But, I don’t like doing that. The bag hangs funny and sticks out from the wall unnecessarily far. Plus, I mean, come on, Black and Decker. Shoulder straps are for shoulders. Put a hanging loop on it. They didn’t, so I did.
I’m sure I’ve got a piece of webbing or something like that I could have used to make a little hanging loop. But, I also happened to have some leftover tubular hose shielding fabric from a hose repair I did recently. You know those “pocket hoses” that have gotten popular, the ones that expand when the water is on but shrink down to next to nothing when you drain them.
Loosely related side story:
Don’t leave those hoses out in the sun with water in them. There’s a limit to how much they’ll expand. I made that mistake on one of those 1000-degree days back in July, but I turned it into a learning opportunity. First, I always wondered what those hoses looked like inside. Second, it was a good opportunity to practice hand stitching with a curved upholstery needle. The hoses are just some silicon-like tubing covered in some sort of woven nylon-ish fabric. Nothing magic. I felt around and found the burst spot in the tubing, cut the cover fabric and cleaned up the tubing ends, inserted a tubing splice fitting, secured the fitting with zip ties (the second time. . . ), and sewed the cover back together.
Here's how it came out:
Works like new. I'll send you some sort of certificate of achievement if you can pinpoint the repair. I think I did a pretty good job on this one.
I didn’t cut away much tubing when
I repaired the hose but somehow I ended up with at least a few feet of the fabric
covering which I, of course, saved in case I found a use for it. Which I did,
and which you are now reading about. The extra hose cover material was sitting
around in my garage, where I last left my leaf sucking machine, and it seemed
like just the thing for this little customization project. I cut off about 6”
of it and formed a simple loop. I was all set to sew this loop to my backpack
when I realized that the shoulder straps were sewn between two layers of fabric,
not just tacked to the outside of the backpack like an afterthought. I couldn’t
just slap the loop on like some drunk hillbilly, so I left the project for this
morning when I had a break.
Cutting the original stitches was pretty easy. The hardest part was getting the wrapper off of one of those little break-off razor knives that I keep around for just such tasks. They’re very handy tools which you can buy super cheap at certain tool stores (I’m allowing a little room here for possible commercial affiliation opportunities on this blog. . . Guy’s gotta eat, right?). I highly recommend them for ripping very tight seams where a regular seam ripper might end up poking a hole through your work piece. Unwrapping them is a pain in the butt, though. You really need one that’s already unwrapped so you can use it to cut the plastic wrapper off new ones. Oddly, I couldn’t seem to find one that wasn’t already unwrapped and I broke off the end of the handle trying to unwrap a new one.
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| Very Handy Tools |
Once I got the wrapper off my little cutter, I got the stitches between the shoulder straps cut so I could insert my loop ends. From there it was just a matter of getting things arranged under the presser foot and sewing everything back together with an x-box. Not my best stitching – I did this on The Beast (Consew 225), which sews up to 5000 stitches per minute and can quickly get ahead of my ability to feather the clutch motor.
Now I have a hanging loop!
Maybe not a true 5-minute project by the time I rethreaded the machine and did a little unplanned seam ripping but still pretty quick. I think the needle was just a bit too small for the thread I used. Not sure what’s in the machine right now but probably a size 16 or 18. The top thread was still wanting to shred some and is probably at least T90, possibly T135. Could have gone much smaller on both the thread and needle; there were visible needle holes when I got done and it’s not like this bag weighs 100 pounds. So, coming soon to this blog: an overview of thread and needle sizes.
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