Havant Repair Café and Voodoo

Havant Repair Cafe

The link is to a little video that my fellow textiles repairer made and posted on her FB page.  She sent me the link by WhatsApp (another piece of Voodoo) and although I don't have an FB account I can view it - but I can't attach it here as a video.  (A Voodoo too far for my tiny brain.)

That's me reattaching limbs to a small sheepskin teddy bear which it's owner told me was over 60 years old.  Had I known I was going to be a movie star today I would have died my hair pink and worn my best neon pink jumper. (Viewers of the British TV program The Repair Shop will know what I am talking about.)  People watch that program and bring their best childhood companions into the Repair Café for a makeover, imagining I suspect, a similar level of application of time and skill and availability of materials.  

Fortunately for me the bear, being real sheepskin, was in remarkably good repair other than his limbs had detached because the metal washers that held them in place but allowed them to articulate, had rusted and eaten away the leather in a neat circle on each limb.  All that was required was a suitable colour of very strong thread (the kind you would sew up a leather bag with say) and I stitched right through the end of the limb (hiding the stitch in the woolly fluff) and through the metal eye on which the limb had originally rotated.

Said bear can no longer do the splits (legs and arms no longer do a complete 360 degree rotation) but I like to think that was just weird for a bear anyway.

Martha was not so lucky - the sheep pillow that she was presented with had suffered severe facial injuries at the teeth of an 18 month old pooch, annoyed possibly that Mum and Dad hoomans had gone out and left her alone with the extensive collection of stuffed toys.  She seemed to know that this was Mum's favourite.  Dad brought the sheep in for repair because Mum was too distraught to look at it.  Pooch had surgically excised a neat oval around the eyes - oval and eyes were presented up for reattachment but the poor sheep was going to look like Frankenstein's monster.  Martha managed to match the colour and apply a patch that had the sheep looking instead like a masked action hero out of a Marvel movie and then there was only the question of the eyes....  (I think they had to be glued on in the end.  I hope the glue is strong.  At least it is not a child's toy.

One eye got attached OK, the other needs magic

 

And yes, it did get a ribbon bow around its neck at the end.  (Green.)

As a postscript I see in the back of my photo of Martha's hands, a brochure for the Emsworth Art Trail.  First weekend in May (including the Monday Public Holiday).  If you are anywhere near the coast in East Hampshire and you can work out how to find Emsworth, it is well worth a day out to visit (and Emsworth is a beautiful village too).