I love how you used a cute bird to mend the hole - it’s a great fix!
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Thank you! I’m practicing different mending types and skills on these soon to be outgrown clothes so I dont feel too much pressure to make them “perfect.”
Update: She says they are not uncomfortable and she loves the little birdie so that’s a win for me!
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July challenge
Apparently I forgot to create one. Oops!
Wild card challenge! Feel free to reuse one of the earlier challenges, or create your own.
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So, my daughter is obsessed with my old Teddy Bear. Takes it everywhere, sleeps with it, he is loved. He was my favorite childhood friend as well. He needs a makeover. My adolescent mends kept his stuffing in but are coming undone and are quite obvious (like the bright red thread stitching at his crotch, for instance) and he is wearing thin in other parts.
Today is the day. I started his bath.
I. Am. Horrified. (lol)
Judging by the state of his bathwater it is possible he hasnt been bathed since Santa left him under a tree in 1973 for “the new baby” to be born the next month.
Stay tuned. Please don’t call the authorities, let’s just consider it “immunity building” as she’s a pandemic child and hasn’t been around too many people to build up hers. 
Edit (July 17) I just brushed him up a bit and he’s so much softer now! He’s still a Flat Stanley and I had thought that I had enough stuffing in stash but it looks like I’ll need more so I ordered some (and a whole lotta random fun stuff) from Joanns. I’ll use it eventually if I manage to eek out enough stash to make him whole again.
I need to address his worn spots. I dont want to totally deconstruct him, I dont actually know how to sew properly so I want to keep him as intact as possible. I might be able to undo just enough stitching to turn him inside out for repairs but that’s a theory for another day. I’m heading to bed where I will obsess over whether to give him a new nose or not.
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lol my brother brought his child hood bear from 1958…I thought I was going to have to wear a hazmat suit when I took it apart and cleaned it…I did throw out the batting and restuff it…I will venture to say that the bear probably is what gave my brother immunity to so many common illnesses…he rarely gets sick even though his health habits are poor! lol
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Lol!
I probably should have deconstructed him first, but the kid was watching and it was getting a little too like Linus reacting to Lucy after the visit to the pumpkin patch so bath first it was! Lol. After she goes to bed i’ll make any surgical maneuvers.
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It’s time… My beloved sun hat has a weak spot that will soon be a gaping hole.
A few weeks ago I realised I have two large bags of leather scraps in my stash for some reason. Some of the scraps are kind of similar to the colour of the straw in the hat. Will it be perfect? Nope. But perfect is not going to help me get anything done.
Enough thinking about it. I’ll make a good enough mend so I can keep using the hat, before the hole gets too big to fix.
Sooo… glue gun it is. Wish me luck!
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I had been thinking a lot about this thread while replacing all the guts in one of our toilet tanks. Of course, it’s a brand that has proprietary guts that both cost more and are harder to find. It would be so much easier and quicker to just get a new toilet! But how wasteful (pun?) and really unnecessary. Until I flippin’ broke the porcelain on the base! Seriously, after lots of online searching and researching and multiple trips to more than one store I finally had all the right parts and had them all installed and all that was left was reattaching the tank and the water supply! Ugh. The real kicker is because of the (weird) way the sewage hole was installed I can’t even replace it with the kind of toilet I want (one-piece, 10" rough-in, chair-height, elongated bowl) unless I want to spend at least $700 and wait for delivery. Will pick up new, mediocre, toilet on Monday. Sigh. 
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Hey, @AIMR , didn’t you post about that bear here? I think I remember you posting what you did with it but I can’t get anything to turn up in a search. I’m in the debating how much to shore him up in the weak spots and I vaguely recall someone posting about that step somewhere around here. It may have been the old place, I suppose…
This video has some basics.
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Thanks, I’ll check it out. 
Yeah, it was the old place…I had to remake a shirt for the bear because I needed the body to replace a missing limb and to shore up the legs.
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Old Bear update:
He’s not too bad, really. A few worn spots at the joints (to be expected) and on one side of his face (I imagine the side that was smooshed into the pillows over the years maybe). I might be able to get a patch in behind the cheek without it being noticeable on the front side. The joints I think I’ll just mend closed like they had been but with a less horrible thread color choice and, one hopes, neater stitching. Now that his muzzle is washed and brushed I can see that he once had a hard nose (I have no recollection of this.) so I’m debating which direction to go here. I want him to still look like himself just cleaner/safer/sturdier and I don’t want the daughter to be outraged that he’s too different.
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Ask her…
First I have to decide how I feel about a different look! haha! Afterall, he’s my life long companion! hahaha
Then, yeah, maybe she’ll get a vote. 
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Lol, I hear you. My daughter had my blue dog for a few years. I’ve got him back now, mines forevorb.
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I did a stitched nose with embroidery. That way, if my brother didn’t like it, I could undo it. He didn’t even notice.The eyes were tougher…It had one eye but I couldn’t find a perfect match so I switched them both out…again, he didn’t notice. Sometimes I think it is just the presence of the item that makes the difference.
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How awesome!
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I finally received the order of fiber fill for Old Bear’s makeover. That took (what feels like) forever! She’ll have forgotten all about him before I get the poor fella back up to playful. Geez Louise.
Update:
He’s been washed, unstuffed, hosed out (literally with a garden hose to get the dusty bits of degraded stuffing chunks out), flat dried, hung dried, brushed, had fusible interfacing questionably ironed into the back of his face, restuffed (but not too much, we want him to look like himself), stitched shut and weak spots sewn up and I added a nose in embroidery floss. I’m debating a mouth and I would like to glue down his wonky eye again after maybe doing something in black embroidery floss to mimic the “good” eye.
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