Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Artifacture via MidJourney

This one has taken years to get done. On the day after Thanksgiving, when we had a gathering with family to see some old Kodachrome slides my uncle had brought (the last time I saw him alive, sadly), my daughter even chastised me for coming to my aunt's with a hole in my jeans. It seemed if I had a t-shirt and a long-sleeves shirt over the jeans, who could care? But there it was, a reproach in a string that led to a worsening wrangle.

Why does this job always bog down? For the lack of patches. But surely, in the massive jumble of old clothes stuffed in drawers, boxes, and closets, there's something that can be used for a patch?! You would think! But it always bogs down. It's not even the sewing, which to be sure, is a chore.

Why a chore, when it's seemingly a few minutes of sewing plain stitches? Answer: my eyesight is so poor I can't thread a needle. In fact, several years ago now, earlier in the pandemic, I confronted this problem by asking my daughter-in-law to thread a bunch of needles for me with long threads and mail them to me. But then I discovered you could buy a set on Amazon ready-made and that would save her having possible problems at the post office — plus doing this silly chore for me. So I ordered them…and then they all ended up getting tangled up terribly in the desk drawer (that same desk with the shelf where the outside is now clean but not the inside….)

I opened them up, looked at them, then didn't do the job for months on end. This always happens. For want of the patch.

Now, I needed a real, determined intervention, to get Just One Thing done. I looked at the bag of stuff in the bedroom destined for the Good Will — another Just-One-Thing-in-the-Making. That led to some backsliding, as I retrieved some items out of it that I thought I didn't want to give away, after all.

But wait, that shirt doesn't really fit, it shrunk (a hand-made sort of tye-died thing bought on Cape Cod ages ago). I tried it on. It was too tight to wear. I would not be wearing it. Truly, I cannot keep it, even though it is not tattered, only slightly faded in places. OMG this is ridiculous.

I then found an old Bat Man t-shirt of my son's, evidently, cut up and shredded, God knows why, perhaps for a Halloween costume or some strange purpose, but I couldn't have that be the patch, or it would like like in fact not a patch, but underwear showing through! See, I think of everything, once chastised…

Now it was time to thread the needle, sadly. The tangled mess was so bad that I had to cut off all the threads, then under a very strong lamp, and taking like 50 tries, finally get first one needle, then another, then a third all threaded to complete this task. This was taking forever. This should maybe have become a chunked-up JOT. But, momentum….

Yes, I finally decided that the too-tight batik sort of shirt had to become the patch. It could then be saved for other patches! or collages! I could cut off a corner so that two of the sides would even be already finished with double stitching and it might hold better. So, first I sewed all around the edges on the jeans, the hole was now too large to sew up outright. Then I folded up the sides to the patch and somehow sewed it all on, although it was indeed a half-assed job. Not without at one point sewing the whole pant leg together, despite using a magazine as a kind of thimble. That required pulling out the thread and starting over.

This is why things don't get done.

Seeing what a half-assed job it was in the end, I went around the edges again with the needle and thread and the result was — adequate. The chief feature of this JOT is that it is now done and the patch is at least acceptable and better than the ever-enlargening hole.

Just One Thing. That took years. And now of course I see the edges of the pant legs are quite frayed and I should either turn those under or better yet, patch them so they aren't so short if turned up. I have the material!