Clothes Repairs

Blessing Darlings!

As I mentioned in the last blog post - while our income is finally up and stabilized, we still need to be frugal/cheap.  One way we're doing this is to keep our clothes wearable as long as possible.  This means, amongst other things, that we .... okay, *I* need to do clothes repairs.

Therefore one of the purchases I've already made this year was material to use to patch clothes with.  The least expensive way I've found to be sure that I have a variety of colors of material for this is to buy pre-packaged 1/2 yard swatches of material at Walmart.  The brand is Waverly.  Solid colors are 97 cents before tax.  Since most repairs don't take a lot of material, one package per color lasts me at least a year, except for the black one.  I use a LOT of that to repair my work clothes.

So for $2 of material, and maybe $1 of thread, and I can save at least $10 that I'd have spent on new work clothes every year.  I probably save even more than that - repair one pair of pants and I save $15.  The shirts are 'only' $3 each, but if I only have to replace two instead of 5 a year, I save another $9.  By repairing 3 shirts the other night at work, I more than paid back the investment I made in material.

Yes, I repaired my work shirts at work.  It very was a slow night.  It was, arguably, work related.  My boss and the supervisor on duty were aware of what I was doing.  They may or may not be as hands-off if I repair other clothes at work.

By doing these repairs, I also reduce the amount of garbage I create, and, since most of my clothes are cheap cotton - reducing buying more of them reduces the amount of pesticides used and saves a lot of water use (growing cotton uses a HUGE amount of pesticides and a large amount of water.)

Oh - I don't buy the material in either white or tan.  THOSE colors of cotton I have plenty of, from saving salvageable parts of my husbands tan/khaki pants, and use them to repair his NEWER pants that need patches.  And those pants are way more $$$ than my cheap pants.

Reduce, repair, re-use, recycle!

Frondly, Fern