darn.

Upstairs in the bedroom is a laundry basket where we put things that need to be dry-cleaned. Cheap and lazy people that we are, the basket is full and has been for quite some time. It is entirely filled with wool sweaters. Some people like sweatshirts, others like to layer t-shirt and long johns, but my husband is a sweater man. You might think that with a basket full of sweaters permanently in the dirty laundry, he'd be going around cold. You'd be mistaken. He has plenty of other wool sweaters. Since they too are dry-clean only and have been worn multiple times, you couldn't really call them clean, but they have not yet taken on enough body funk to qualify them for the basket. Honestly, we could probably just take the dirty sweaters to the thrift store, and he would continue to buy more used sweaters to replace the ones that gradually become dirty enough to be classified as such. I think in that case, he would be likely to buy back his own sweaters from the thrift store. I sorta doubt that the thrift store washes dry-clean only goods before putting them out on the sales floor, so they wouldn't actually be any cleaner. But he would think they were clean, for only $3.50 plus tax, which is a heck a lot cheaper than our dry-cleaners bill would ever be if we ever stopped being so lazy.

The thing they say about married people looking alike is true to a point, in that I wear a lot more sweaters than I used to. I used to be more the type to layer shirts, though I have sweatshirts, too. Now, I layer t-shirts and sweaters.

Once, Josh got a hole in the sleeve one of his favorite sweaters. He consulted the internet, and using some yarn I had that didn't quite match, he darned up the hole. I was impressed. For one thing, I didn't even know exactly what "darning" was, other than it was something that women in little houses on prairies did to socks. For all I knew, it meant to make puppets. Sadly, it does not. It means to take yarn and weave a patch over a hole, possibly in a sock, but also maybe in a sweater. He did a reasonable job - the patch was in an out-of-the-way spot, and really the most noticeable thing was that the yarn was a different color. What was even cuter than a man darning a sweater was how proud he was of himself afterwards. He was wearing his rehabilitated sweater, and every five minutes or so, I would catch him looking at his handiwork and grinning, which was another impressive feat, since looking at it required contortions similar to kissing your elbow.

This afternoon, while wearing a t-shirt and sweater combo, I noticed that my elbow felt oddly cold. It did not feel warm and comforted by the snuggly softness of my very nice, orange, cashmere cardigan, inherited from Josh's grandfather. I looked, and there was a hole, about an inch round. Darn!

Well, that's okay. I know what to do. I stopped at the craft store on my way home, and used the sweater to pick out some matching embroidery thread. I looked up a tutorial, and I fixed the hole. And then for good measure, I fixed another tiny one that I found nearby, figuring that big holes came from ignoring little holes. Unsurprisingly, the little patch is hardly noticeable, while the big patch, well, looks like a patch. But the color match is pretty good, and I think it adds a certain hobo chic. I find myself admiring my own work over and over, and of course I also went online and wrote a whole stupid essay about it. Makes me feel kinda bad for teasing Josh about the million times he looked at his own mending. I may even apologize...after I show off my own needlework, of course.