I suspect this is a lesson in why you shouldn’t clean wearing nice clothes and definitely why you shouldn’t use bleach, m’kay but I thought I’d ask anyway.

I managed to flick bleach all over one of my favourite t-shirts but I’m not quite ready to give up on it just yet. The shirt has a printed design on it so I can’t bleach and re-dye the whole shirt.

Googling around, I’ve seen some suggestions of disguising the pale dots with permanent marker – the shirt is brown though so I don’t know if I’ll find a pen to match.

The design is a bright cartoon design so I might get away with adding some “noise” to the picture with fabric paint or reverse/normal appliqué.

Failing all that, I guess I could make something else with the fabric/design or since it fits well, take it apart to make a pattern to use to make my own fitted t-shirts in the future. I’d really like to keep it as a tshirt though – any other suggestions?

• Now the rush to the holidays is out of the way, it’s a perfect time to catch up with fixing and mending stuff around the home and those dozens of jumpers snagged by cats over the first properly chilly bit of the season (… just me?). The Craft blog recently had a roundup of some fab repair projects to get fixing juices flowing.
• MJ over at Making Do with the Not So New posted about a great scheme someone has set up in her area – community give and take chests. Perfect for things not suitable for a charity shop (such as food or once-used bottles of bathroom supplies) or things too small to warrant a Freecycle/Freegle posting.
• MJ also linked to webecca’s yarn winder (swifts) tutorials – made re-using random household objects such as clothes pegs and coathangers.
• Crafting a Green World’s Becky linked to a video tutorial on making cute little handbags from the covers of old, damaged hardback books.
• Craftstylish’s Cal has written a great how-to on replacing a coat lining to breath new life into a tattered vintage coat. The same idea can also be extended to making a coat that bit warmer for winter.
• Finally, reuse old drinking straws and expanded foam packaging to make handy storage for seed beads. It would work for actual seeds too – easy to sprinkle them out at planting time.

(Photo by Diane Gilleland for Craft)

We’ve had an email from Yvonne, asking:

I have a small vinyl accordion door (single door size). One of the vinyl folds are tearing. How can I fix?

There seem to be a range of vinyl repair kits available for fixing small holes in furnishings, which might do the job.

Searching around for general advice on repairing vinyl, it seems there is a difference between fixing it and fixing it neatly. It some places the latter is seen as important but it can be a pain to find vinyl to match the colour of your aged/sun-bleached stuff. On an accordion door, you could make a feature of the repair by using a contrasting stripe of colour – and uses more stripes to reinforce the other folds to stop their tearing in the future. That would probably take more vinyl than you’d get in a little kit though.

Any more detailed fix suggestions?

Because she’s a keen fixer of things, I told Alice in Blogland about our new “Repair This” feature and she replied that she had something in need of mending, but didn’t know how to go about it:

It’s a pair of waterproof trousers which have taped seams. Basically I bent over in them and the seam split right down the middle, leaving the fabric intact but tearing the seam tape. Can I buy waterproofing seam tape from somewhere? What’s it called? And do I need to sew it in some sort of special way so that it ends up waterproof – if I do it wrong then I guess all my needle holes will let in water!

Any ideas?