stitches in time
hobo style
I'm starting to look a little ragged these days, I'm afraid. Not buying any new clothes in well over a year will do that to a gentleman. Socks with holes, shoes coming apart at the seams (and the soles), rips in all my jeans: the dispiriting list goes on. Yesterday it was the turn of a pair of corduroy trousers to suffer what I feared was a mortal wound when I put my foot up on my bike frame to roll up my cuffs. A gigantic rip in the crotchal area—lucky it only happened on the way home, and not when I was doing straddle jumps in gym or vaulting a post on the playground at recess (yes, I do work very hard). But Leah says that it can be fixed!
She does amazing work in keeping me together, really. The patches on my jeans are stylish as well as functional, and I say as much to anyone who comments on them. Actually, I usually say "functional as well as stylish", because the assumption in this modern world is that our distressed clothes are straight from the boutique. Not mine: I came by those rips naturally! And I want to make sure that everybody—especially everybody at work—knows that a good part of the reason for my patches is that I don't get paid enough to buy another pair of quality jeans. Our days of shopping at Ruehl are over! Though so are everybody else's too, I suppose: the brand apparently went belly-up some time last year.
Maybe we're not the only ones to decide that you don't need to buy expensive new jeans if you can keep the ones you have going with a few stylish stitches. Although, I don't actually know how many stitches are required: as I intimated, clothing repairs are strictly Leah's department. So perhaps it's hypocritical of me to advocate mending rather than buying new, but I think that it's something that, at the very least, is worth thinking about. And in my defense, I'm really good at the not-buying-new part!