I don't need anything sewn to my hand, thank you very much.
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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So many different kinds of stitches to use and learn. I love the Henson stitch. Yay Muppets!
Us traveling kids just use floss for thread. Works great.
Welcome home, fam.
They tried to teach me to sew in high school and I immediately knew that I was shit at it and ran far, far away.
Interested to see a citation on how it can reduce impact on the environment. I mean like, yes technically it is a reduction but is it really a meaningful reduction? I would imagine the impact is probably pretty negligible for the average person.
The cloth and thread are manufactured in the same facilities as clothes, and transported along the same methods. Needles, spools, and other sewing related products would have their own footprint that is factored into the footprint of regular clothes at a reduced fraction. If one uses a sewing machine, the same would be said for the electricity generated to operate it. The only thing you are really cutting out is the time that the cloth spent being assembled into an article of clothing in a factory and potentially pad prints/silk screening. Which is fine, except this is brought up as a hobby and not as a skill for repairing existing clothing to last longer and reduce amount of clothes sold. Not that it really matters because clothes are wastefully over-produced and unsold units are sent to a landfill in another country.
As a hobby, one will often be more wasteful as they are less skilled, leading to higher initial volume of cloth purchased. Also, a lot of "practice pancakes" likely to end up directly in the local landfill.
Not that learning how to sew is bad, even as a hobby or anything. I am just skeptical on the environmental claim. I don't see it really making that much of a difference for the average person, personally.
Plus, and this is probably just because I live in California, but fabric is morbidly expensive here. Even the cheap stuff. Its been getting more expensive since at least 2014. This has led to multiple fabric selling stores closing in my area. Cant buy what you cant afford. Even thrift shops are charging a lot. A worn-out t-shirt is like $9 USD. Which is almost the price of some brand new shirts online.
(The yellow stitches are basting stitches, meant to hold the hexagons to the paper and will eventually be removed)
I paid about $2 for this stack of 10 t-shirts. (Avoid goodwill, go to the mom and pop places). None of these shirts were ever going to be used again. No one wants the t-shirt of a random church or police department, or a stained white t-shirt, or a high school football team.
Instead of buying fabric - buying something new which would encourage a retailer to buy something to replace it - I am repurposing these shirts into yarn (which I knit into rugs), patches for other clothing (which would otherwise need to be thrown away), reusable bags, or scrap quilts (which will mean that I can keep my thermostat lower in the winter).
These shirts are the kinds of things that would otherwise end up as textile waste, a pile of useless clothing in Ghana. “Reuse” in the second R in importance in “reduce, reuse, recycle.”
I think also that the ability to repair clothes instead of throwing them away is a huge part of the equation. I had an ex that would throw clothes away for missing a button. That is not particularly uncommon.