Repairs

 A bunch of years ago, perhaps it was fifteen or twenty years ago my sister admired a challah cover in my stash and I gave it to her.

It looked like this when it was new.

The challah cover was made out of a mix of fabrics, a Chinese brocade, a cross-dyed silk shantung and I painted the text onto olive green linen.

Cross dyed silk shantung is just visual magic. Unfortunately, silk shantung has a life-span. Eventually, the warp threads fail and the fabric begins to shred. My sister loves the challah cover and mailed it to me hoping that I could repair it.

I knew I had to replace the golden-green shantung. I rummaged through my stash of upholstery fabrics hoping that I would have something in the right color and weight. I found a few things that were the right weight but not the right color.

I then pulled out this.

My friend Arleen had dropped off a couple of yards of this Scalamandre fabric when she was downsizing. She had covered her dining room chairs in this gorgeous fabric.  Clearly, the red is the wrong color but when I flipped the fabric over, it was a perfect match. perfect.

I cut away all of the silk first from the brocade border, and then from the linen inset.

 I carefully stitched the linen onto the upholstery fabric. I knew I had to cover the join with braid or ribbon. I have a large spool of blue and gold military braid. I stitched over the blue with an orange-colored thread in a feather stitch. The orange tones down the blue and makes the ribbon go with the upholstery fabric. I attached the braid with a wide zigzag in grey which tones down the gold. In the photo below you can see the braid before and after being stitched. 

 

 

When I have a bit more energy I will complete the job. I have to engineer the join between the upholstery fabric and the silk brocade. As I look at the photo below I am awfully pleased with what I have done.

I think working with the beautiful colors of the reverse of the Scalamadre fabric made me see the orchid in my building's lobby with fresh appreciation.

The linen cloth I had on our dining room table throughout Yom Kippur developed a moon-shaped hole while in the wash. The hole was too big to simply darn. I inset a patch made out of two layers of a man's linen hankie.

Your eyes do not deceive you. The patch is not an identical white to the tablecloth. The cloth itself is one of those slightly grey European linens. I am sure that there is a name for that variety of linen. At some point, someone will tell me the correct name, but for now, it's just greyish linen to me. I used a light grey thread to attach the patch.

Here is the mended patch next to some of the pretty drawn thread work. it is such a simple pattern, three interlocking squares I assume that this was a homemade cloth, rather than one purchased in a store.

Yes, these two mending jobs the challah cloth and the table cloth are essentially the same tasks done in two different scales