Heatwaves, holes and world-changing stories of hope
Extreme temperatures force a change to our regular programming
I can’t get all the things done this week. It shouldn’t be business as usual when we’re in the throes of a heatwave. As a neighbour said to me recently, we need to learn to adapt with this kind of extreme heat occurring more often.
Here in Bristol and around the UK, schools are shut and some transport has ground to a halt. It’s currently London Climate Action Week and many of my friends and colleagues have had to cancel their plans due to the disruption caused by this weather emergency. The irony is not lost on us.
The school my sons go to didn’t shut yesterday like other local educational settings. It’s a Victorian building, with high ceilings and thick brick walls so even though it wasn’t built with a heatwave in mind, it was cool enough to remain open. Its modern counterparts - also not built for this weather – needed to close. These schools, our homes and many workplaces will need to adapt for our changing weather over the coming years.
And those are just a couple of the practical impacts locally in Bristol. I’m aware of how fortunate I am – I have a house, a garden and can work flexibly from home. As I type this, I’m sitting in my cool basement kitchen while my kids play upstairs (I’m also lucky that they get on so well). My husband works full-time and we can afford to buy the essentials and take a little time off work if we need to. Those are just a few of my many privileges. I know others locally will be far more impacted by this heatwave than I am – many kids will be enclosed in homes today that are hotter than the school grounds. That’s just the tip of the melting iceberg.
With the school closure, I haven’t achieved last week’s aim of reworking the waistband on my stripy trousers. While thinking about what I could feature on the post today, a photo popped up on my laptop screen of an H&M cotton top repair I did on this day in 2017 (above). I did this outside on a comfortably sunny June day, sitting on my picnic blanket stitching whilst my then two-year-old son napped.
As it’s from the archive I haven’t written about it on here yet, and its sheer knit makes it a strong candidate to feature in a heatwave. I did consider sharing some jumper darning but just looking at the photos of chunky wool knits made me feel too hot!
A couple of years later, another hole appeared on the other arm and I darned that with a different colour cotton (below). I could have done both these darns in cream thread to make them more subtle or used bright shades to make them very visible. For some reason, I chose natural tones. These days, I usually opt for a statement darn, both as a protest to our damaged fashion culture, and as a way to show other people an alternative to binning their damaged clothes.
My mending kit for this repair:
Needle
Sewing thread
Darning mushroom
Snips
Here’s how I did this repair:
It can be tricky do darn on a very fine knit so you do need good clear light. And using a contrast thread does help - it would have been harder to do this darn with a matching cream cotton. This is a traditional stocking darn.
Starting a little outside the hole and using a darning mushroom to keep the tension, I wove a warp vertically over and under alternate loops, going up one row and down the next
Then I wove the weft horizontally over and under the new warp threads
Finally, I wove the loose ends back into the darned area at the back to secure them
If, like me, you’re feeling the heat and wanting to do something about it but aren’t sure where to start, I thoroughly recommend listening to the marvellous podcast ‘Screw this… let’s try something else’. Hosts Matt Golding and Maryam Pasha share stories from communities around the UK that are not content to sit around waiting for things to get done. These ‘ordinary neighbourhoods doing something extraordinary’ offer us inspiring, yet down-to-earth alternatives to the status quo.
Described by Brian Eno as ‘a podcast of hope filled stories that could genuinely change the world’, ‘Screw this… let’s try something else’ guides us through what these passionate, pioneering citizens have done in their communities. And it reminds us how much power we hold in our hands to re-envision our communities and live better, together.
You can find out more here on Matt’s Substack:
And listen on Apple or Spotify:
What’s coming up this week:
My mending pile: nothing woollen…it’s too hot for that.
Next week on The Mending Kit: I’d like to say I’ll get that trouser waistband done but I have a fair few work projects on so it may not happen. I do have a zip repair to do, so that may feature next week.
Want to read some more of my posts about darning? You can find them here: Darns from The Mending Kit.
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