The photo above is a closeup of a major tear across the back of what was once pretty much my favourite short-sleeved shirt—so much so that I wore it in several selfies over the years. However, as it became a bit older and worn (a bit like me…), I only wore it at home, and when I wasn’t going anywhere. I knew it was only a matter of time before it would be unwearable, and that finally happened recently: I was tucking the shirt in before putting on a sweatshirt when it got cold, and with a loud rip, the mid-back got a gaping gash across it.
I liked the shirt because it was baggy, and because it didn’t need to be ironed, however, that may have sped it’s demise: As it got older, it got wrinkles (a bit like me…), especially in the lower half of the back (totally unlike me…). Those creases, as high points in the fabric, became worn until one eventually tore open. Would ironing have extended its life? Well, probably, because if I needed to iron it I wouldn’t have worn it very much (at any given time, I have quite a few shirts waiting to be ironed).
Three shirts could be saved, though: Two shirts had buttons broken in half, and a third had lost a button for its button-down collar. All the shirts had spare buttons sewed onto them, so all I needed to do was match the thread colour closely enough and sew on the replacement buttons.
I chose the button-down collar to fix first because I knew it’d be the hardest: I had to figure out where the button went. I also struggled a bit getting the spare button freed—which made me wish the original button had been attached nearly that well. In the end, I succeeded. I haven’t worn the shirt in eons because of the missing button, and I’m not sue how much I wore it before that, so it’s kind of like a new shirt, I guess.
I next took on the two shirts with half-buttons. I again struggled with getting the spare buttons freed, and then managed to drop the first one making me spend a couple minutes looking for it on the floor. Oops. Both of these shirts were also “at home only” shirts, though I have worn both “in public” in the past.
My next step was to iron a bunch of shirts, including one of the formerly half-button shirts, part of an attempt to maybe prevent a repeat of the back gash incident. At this point, I should be wrapping up the story, congratulating myself, and celebrating another small victory. But this adventure wasn’t done with me yet.
As I ironed the button-down short, the iron hit something in a pocket: It was the button that had fallen off. I had absolutely no recollection of putting the button in there when it fell off, and, in fact, thought I remembered simply discovering it was gone. Now I have a loose little button for the shirt, which I’ll put in my sewing kit in a tiny plastic bag with a note telling me what it is. Just in case. (yes, I did consider sewing the loose button into the seam, but, too much work. For now).
It turned out in the end that while there are limits on what repairs I can do, there are also limits to what can be repaired (like the gash in the back of that shirt). However, the bigger obstacle seems to be, as it so often is, misremembering things related to what I want to do, in this case, that I put that button in the pocket of the shirt it fell off of. Forgetting all about that meant that I ended up making more work for myself—and it gave me a loose button.
While the extra work and loose button has a kind of shoulder-shrug of unimportance, it’s also yet another example of how my unreliable memory causes problems—very, very minor ones, sure, but problems nonetheless. I wish I had the kind of memory I had 20 or 30 years ago, but that’s not the way these things work, so this was one of my motivations for creating my personal organisation system. There were other things that helped me work out how to structure the system, but finding ways to compensate for my unreliable memory was chief among them.
That new system has worked pretty well. It’s also much easier than trying to get a spare button freed. So, yay.
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