Mend clothes?

For years my mother-in-law mended clothes for me; she would ask to keep the children for a week every summer and wanted a pile of mending to help me out. She bought all of the children’s clothing at the Salvation Army thrift store and at Goodwill; she gave me money and sent me to go the rounds of yardsales every month in the summer, looking for things we needed. I didn’t take good care of clothing beyond cleaning. There didn’t seem to be a need to; the clothing she gave us was good enough, not new, and there was plenty of it.

I didn’t so much as sew on a button except on my husband’s National Guard uniforms. When he became a Spec 4 (Specialist 4th class), he had his uniforms dry cleaned every month. The dry cleaner’s clothing press crushed the buttons. He brought me a military sewing kit, a tiny plastic sleeve with four colors of thread, white, black, brown, and military green. It had a needle, a flat threading tool, and about four straight pins in their own plastic sleeve. Over 20 years we accumulated three or four of these kits.

This is not to say, we never repaired anything. It just… was not a high priority. When my mother-in-law fixed things, that was good, but if it was not repairable, we threw it out. We eventually moved too far away to bring her repairs. If clothing was too damaged to wear but needed only minor repairs, I put it in a pile. It sat there for years, until we threw it out, right before moving house again. My seven children outgrew clothing faster than they could wear most of it out, anyway; I rinsed, washed, dried, sorted, put away, and then rewashed and put away over and over and over. If it didn’t fit, I didn’t have time to worry about it. We regularly donated loads to Goodwill and brought new used clothing home in larger sizes.