Yes that is a word. I made it up.
I have a horror of moths. They make me shudder. Once upon a time, long ago and far away, an extraordinarily annoying person frequently left screen doors open. In the evening. While lights were on inside. As you might well imagine hoards of moths flew in and I was not able to kill them all or frighten them with my squeals.

Imagine my (outrage? annoyance?) when I discovered some of my nice things chewed up by the little beasts. They only eat the good stuff… 😦

No fixing this is there? Or is there…? Hmm. Wait a minute, I know how to fix this. I shall very cleverly make it all look intentional with embroidery. But no design or transfer of drawings, just needle and floss and a bit of fun.
Here we go…

First thing is to select which colour; I was leaning towards a green on this orange but that’s a bit too Irish even for me. My daughter rolled her eyes, imagine that! Anyway, pale blue methinks.

First I washed the moth-eaten things good and hot and dried them hot too. Then the fun started. First an outline, in stem stitch of course. I used a great big fat chenille needle and four strands of floss. I just let the needle meander and played around. Sometimes it is good to play!!

Now of course the moths had not taken care to create a suitable pattern and my once fancy scarf was looking a little off balance. So I used up the rest of the skein with some random dots to fill it in a bit. All in all I used stem stitch, outline stitch, blanket stitch, buttonhole stitch and a sort of tight whip stitch. You needed to know all that didn’t you?

Overall I’m quite pleased! It’s now a pretty funky scarf, unique and not relegated to the recycling bag. The aforementioned daughter is now eyeing it speculatively but she’ll have a job getting it off me. Hehe…

Why it could almost be intentional! So go on, find something that seems wrecked and mend it. Have a bit of fun while you’re at it!

And a very Happy New Year to you too!