Turning a sheet sides to middle, saving the planet one mend at a time

One of the things that is not is short supply in my house is bed linen. But I have my favourites. This sheet is one of them, it’s a really fine Egyptian cotton one. As a woman of a certain age, hot flushes ubiquitous, So a cool cool sheet is fab.

This one has been used and washed so frequently that it was starting to get rips and the fabric was really thin and worn in the middle. So I decided to go all old fashioned and thrifty and I turned it sides to middle.

It’s easy, you tear it longitudinally down the middle and sew the two outside sides together to be the new middle, this brings the less worn fabric into the centre.

You have to use a flat felled seam, to create as low a seam as possible, so that is not uncomfortable to sleep on.

Flat felling is easy, sew the two sides together, but with uneven seam allowance.

Fold over the longer edge and Stitch it down, turning the raw edge inside, so it is all smooth on the front

And back

There were a few holes, so for fun, and because I love visible mending, I added a patch that I printed.

And another patch that was saved from an old shirt that was too worn to save (more super soft fabric)

This should extend the life of the sheet by quite some time.

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That’s some very oldfashioned mending! Well done!

I remember my grandmother had a few sheets that were mended that way. The booklet that came with my Vintage 1958 Husqvarna describes in great detail how to do this, and many other types of mends that have since fallen out of fashion. If I remember correctly, they recommended sewing some sort of border or bias tape around the edges to cover the fraying fabric.

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You should totally comment on this in the “mend and maintain” thread! So cool!

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I didn’t know that thread exists!

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Nice save!

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Whenever you have the booklet to hand, I would love to see some photos of the pages that shows these kinds of mends, if you can x

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Wunderbar! I like the patches, of course.

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Use it up or wear it out, make it do or do without…

That old saying is not what we hear anymore, but I LOVE that it’s alive and well at your house! Mending is a lost art (almost) and I wish I was better at it myself. I love what you did here. I’m very impressed.

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Excellent save, friend! The patches are great, too!

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To be honest, I’ve never done this before, but it was really easy. Give it a go next time you’ve got a worn sheet.

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Such a great idea, I can see a use for the flat felled seam other places too.

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I will! It’s in storage right now but the manual is great. This is one of the first fancy models of electric sewing machines so the manual is very detailed, a lot of pictures and a lot of advice about which feet and stitches to use, it’s written for people who had never worked with a machine like this before. My mum and grandma were notoriously frugal, so I thought I knew a thing or two about mending, but there were definitely a few things in that manual that I’d never heard of before.

And this was a really expensive machine when it was new, it would have been owned by someone who was relatively wealthy, not the average working class woman. In the postwar period, mending was clearly the norm for everyone, not just people with low incomes.

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It sounds great!

Wow, what a cool resource! I wonder if it’s online somewhere.