A few days ago, when I put on a shirt I hadn’t worn in a while, I looked down at the sleeves I had shortened with disappointment. I used a stitch that looked terrible. On top of that, neither cuff was sewn straight. One was even double sewn in places, as if a drunk man had started making it one width and then changed his mind as it veered off at a diagonal. F***ing ridiculous.
The second I put the shirt on, I was even more annoyed when I looked at the sleeves. Why couldn’t I sew straight! Why wasn’t I more careful when I hemmed the sleeves? Here’s a $50 shirt that I ruined.
The third day, I pulled out my sewing machine and fixed it.
While I was at it, I checked the hems of all of my other shirts and found one more that needed to be redone. And I sewed a failed patch in a set of sheets that had opened up recently.
The entire sewing process took a few hours.
One of the shirts was easy to fix. I used a seam ripper to remove the bad hem and sewed it correctly.
The other shirt had hems that I could not rip out cleanly. After working on them for over hour, I decided to turn the sleeves into “football shirt length”, cut off the bad hems and took my time to make clean ones.
The sheet took 30 seconds to repair.
Now, every time I wear these shirts or tuck myself under the sheet, I won’t be shaking my head. Instead, I’ll get a little jolt of pleasure that I eliminated these small, yet nagging disappointments. They will never take up space in my head again.
And that, for me, is the real win here.