sashiko | Feral Tomatoes

After succeeding with the jeans (which now need a repair at the back pocket seam just like the other ones the same age), my next project was the elbow of my husband’s flannel shirt. I really wanted to use fabric from his old corduroy overshirt, and thankfully there was a nice stretch of it that hadn’t faded or worn too much. He picked this pattern:

Blue fabric stitched in white with a pattern of outlined linked ropes — You can do this on a square or triangular grid. We picked square.

Technically, this isn’t a sashiko design as it doesn’t leave the right amount of space between stitches. However, it does still work well if you make the adjustment. (As an aside, if you go looking for images of sashiko patterns and find them saved to Pinterest, 90% of the time they’ll be linked via a scraped or malware-infested site. Especially if they look like the one above. Don’t bother clicking through to find more or get pointers. Just save the image and move on.)

The fabric of the shirt was seriously shredded, so I had to baste on an inner patch in addition to the outer one. This meant two hems, which I didn’t do a great job of aligning atop each other because I stitched the pattern before the edging. On the other hand, it meant less of a ridge around the edge in most places. Still, from now on I’ll be sewing the edges first to avoid this issue.

Background: black, gray, and red plaid fabric. Foreground: navy blue corduroy fabric stitched around the edge and in an all-over pattern of linked ropes with variegated red-and-gray thread. — This took me waaaaay too long.

The thread I used is by Cottage Garden Threads, 6-strand in colorway Earl Grey, from Snuggly Monkey. It is EXACTLY the colors of the base shirt and I couldn’t believe it when I first saw it. Sadly, several of the other supplies I got from the site weren’t made to work with corduroy, and I ended up mostly drawing the pattern as I went so as to keep it from rubbing completely off. If you do this, I recommend keeping track of your grid with something better than holes poked in graph paper. Me, I’ll be trying to solve the alignment problem and the grid problem together by basting through marked tissue paper. Sometime later, because my next project is another can of worms entirely.

If you offer me the opportunity to save money, reduce waste, and make things prettier all at once, I’m going to say HELL YEAH. So sashiko is exactly the kind of thing that makes me have to repeat to myself “I do not need another craft I do not need another craft I do NOT need ANOTHER CRAFT” and then pick it up anyway.

Front thigh panel of a pair of ripped blue jeans, decorated with sashiko-style stitching of variegated blue tones in an art-deco diamond fan pattern, photographed while worn. — My first attempt at sashiko. There will be more, but these jeans needed immediate help.

Traditional sashiko patterns are largely geometric, like the compass flowers I constructed all over my math book cover in high school (don’t lie, you knew somebody bored enough to do that too). So are art deco designs, I reasoned, and found one I liked. It took a few repeats and false starts to settle out the math and the technique for the bottom starpoint, mainly because I was frustrated that there’s no logical way to make this pattern without carrying thread. But laying down the outer diamonds first (for both strength and guidelines) and then filling in the rays became a really nice rhythm. I added a piece of salvaged corduroy shirt behind the row closest to the rip, and my only regret is not having decided on that before making the row above, because it would’ve been held on better.

Next up: elbow patches made from more of the same corduroy shirt on the flannel that replaced it, stitched with thread in the colors of the flannel. Maybe I’ll try a shippou and hope it doesn’t end in shippai.

Feral Tomatoes

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