Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Make Do and Mend Challenge

make do and mend posterI recently had a generous offer from a skilled woodworker I know - he offered to repair any damaged guitars belonging to my young guitar students, without charge. The children usually buy a cheap instrument to learn on and I don't blame them. Most of them drop lessons after a few months and their parents don't want to invest in a quality instrument without being sure the child is committed. But these poor-quality instruments often end up breaking even without rough handling (although undoubtedly some of them do receive rough handling), and the cost of repairing them far outstrips the cost of replacing them.

I can do minor guitar surgery myself, and frequently do. But there were several instruments that were beyond my skills to repair. I took a variety of busted guitars to my friend's house, and he returned them all amazingly fast, and better than new. He wouldn't accept any payment, and said he enjoyed doing it. As well as a skilled craftsman he is also a keen musician - he has a beautiful tenor voice and I know he enjoys attending concerts as much as he enjoys performing music. So it gave him a buzz to help encourage a new generation of musicians. The children and their parents were delighted, too. And I was over the moon to see the new motivation my students had once their instruments were repaired - many of them had had their enthusiasm dented by having to use a damaged or borrowed instrument.

Repairing something is much better than replacing it, and not just for the obvious reasons of saving money and saving the planet's resources. When we repair things we start to see ourselves as competent and skilled. Consumerism takes that away from us. When we repair things we build up a relationship with the item we repair, it has a history for us and we respect it more than something we "just bought". When we have repaired a few things and we start to become good at it, we have a skill we can share with other people, whether for money or just for love and friendship. We can earn good will and respect from people by sharing our skill with them.

Repair something this month, and tell me how it makes you feel differently about your belongings and the world around you. Don't forget to vote in the poll in the right-hand-sidebar when you've done it.

21 comments:

Anonymous said...

i repaired my OH's leather belt a few days ago. the belt was fine, just the stitching around the buckle had frayed and come undone over time. It was tough but i managed to push a needle (with a thimble) through the existing holes in the leather, and the belt is now being worn again - saves buying another one, which would cost upwards of £20, for the cost of just a little thread. I actually felt quite proud of myself for doing it - I don't know that i would've done it before - but it's given me the encouragement to mend other things, and make still other things out of stuff i already have, which is an extension of repairing, i think...for example, when i was making a skirt, i didn't have a zip - so i raided the bag of charity clothes i was giving away, found a zip that's a suitable colour, and unpicked it from that skirt and reused it in the new one. very frugal. :)

Anonymous said...

I don't usually have the patience to 'mend' things, but one of my more eccentric hobbies is running a 37 year old car. I get a great deal of satisfaction from maintaining it myself, and I'm slowly learning more about how it works. The other day my reverse gear 'disappeared'. So far, it hasn't occurred to me to call a garage; instead I will ask for advice from the owners club, and I'll see if I can fix the problem myself.

Fran

Anonymous said...

We do a lot of mending. We can't do electical work, although John replaced out=r kitchen spotlights with low-calories ones recently, but there are always items of clothing and furniture which need small repairs.

Surely everyone has to mend things sometime? You can't just throw a chair away because the caster has come off and become irretrievably damaged, or when an item of clothing gets a tiny hole which can be repaired, darned or covered up with an applique?

This is Geraldine BTW. Blogger won't recognise my LJ URL. Again

Ivywindow said...

I tend to repair clothes. I am fairly tough on them, and resent replacing things that with a bit of care can have an extended life. When a favourite pair of trousers does die, they often end up the template for me to make more of them. Which reminds me, I really have to get to the hand sewing pile soon...

Gid said...

I repair everything, or try to any way.. I don't like having to buy things, and most of the things we have in the house are rescued from people who were throwing them out.. the only problem I have is that I appear to be running out of room for all the stuff I rescue on the grounds of "that'll come in handy for something one day"..

Z said...

Old things were usually made better than new stuff and they're worth repairing. It so happened that I repaired the zip on my favourite old handbag only yesterday and my husband was altering a kitchen drawer for our daughter today.

It doesn't make me feel different as such, because we've always done it. It's normal.

Matron said...

I repaired an ancient garden hand fork this month. the wooden handle was brittle and dry so i gave it some preservative and a coat of varnish. I found some weatherproof putty and pushed the fork back in the handle. I painted the handle with some hammerite. Saved myself oodles of money!

Vashti said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Vashti said...

Years ago when my partner and I rented our first flat together, we bought the cheapest bed in the Argos catalogue. It was wobbly and unstable and a couple of months ago the frame finally snapped. (And all he did was sit on it ...)

We didn't replace it; we dismantled the whole thing and are either going to freecycle it - lots of nice pine planks - or rework the wood into more bookshelves, which we desperately need. My sister gave me a much more solid and friendly futon frame from Ikea which her local freecycle turned its nose up at, so now we have a much better and second-hand bed.

Also, yesterday we salvaged a cheap bookshelf from outside by the bins, scrubbed it down and (once it's been reinforced with some of the smaller bits of wood from the bed) find it a nice corner where it can fulfil its bookly destiny.

I am not sure whether any of this counts.

Yellow said...

I have a pair of comfy yellow slippers which are about 2 years old. Last Christmas the lining had worn through so I sewed in some new fabric, and did a little re-stitching round the edges where they were giving. A few weeks ago I re-patched the same area, under my heel, and I also sewed on some waterproof table-cloth fabric where the sole wore through on the toe. Slippers are cheap but I've set myself a challenge of how long I can make these last.

Anonymous said...

I enjoy mending things (mostly clothes), I feel that the mended thing carries part of me with it. Mended jeans are more "mine" somehow. We also remake things, for instance, some time ago we had a sudden need for a rabbit hutch (its a long story) and my husband made one out of an old wardrobe. It worked well for years and Kevin the bunny was very happy.

Artela said...

We tend to make do and mend anyway... hardly any furniture we own was new when we got it for instance :-)

Latest "bodge to do the job" was for the new car that arrived without an ashtry - made one from an empty coke can *G*

donna said...

i repaired maisie's jeans by patching the knees. they still fit her perfectly so it would have been wrong to dump them. it feels like you're beating the system!

Robj98168 said...

I repaired my couch and saved $290 or $35 depending how one looks at it. I prefer to take the high road and say $290. I like repairing things. and making new things out of old things. That's what ikea hacking is all about!

Blicky Kitty said...

Donna I have a Maisie too! :) Too bad I'm not clever enough to repair her jeans. I'm afraid my skills lag behind my goal of a living a non-consumer lifestyle. I did sew a doll to our quilt. I guess the only thing I should be proud about it trying. I did use an old dollhouse for a bookshelf instead of buying one.

Is there any hope for the untalented? Maybe I could make cut-off shorts and use the denim to keep garden weeds down?

Ted Marshall said...

Well I haven't actually mended anything, but I did spend 30 minutes scraping a dried paint splodge off my favourite t-shirt, using fingernails, tweezers and a razer-blade. Not a bit of paint left, washed up nicely.

Anonymous said...

I have a couple of mending projects that have been awaiting my attention. The first is my leather jacket; the seam has gone under one of the arms. The second is a small bookrest, which will require wood glue and a couple of little brass plates to reaffix two rather vital pieces.

I hate throwing things away, so I always mean to mend them, but I don't always get round to it.

Anonymous said...

Hmm, so what have I been doing this month?

Making tent pegs from scrap steel, making display boards and notice boards from skip salvage, and making a folding picnic table from an old table top and a couple of salvaged card tables. I've also patched a couple of shirts, and straightened and resharpened a baked bean tin full of old nails. Make do and mend is all we do much of the time. It's quite strange to find that's an approach that's becoming trendy and fashionable!

Melanie Rimmer said...

I'm very flattered Stoney, but if you use Bean Sprouts as your guide to what's trendy and fashionable I'm afraid you're going to be led badly astray!

Anonymous said...

Mel, you're a much better arbiter of fashion and style than almost all of the people who set themselves up in that role. Heck, I'm almost tempted to go for the hairstyle you have in your avatar—length's about right although I'm not sure if very pale blonde goes with my complexion and eyes!

Incidentally, did you realise it's almost three years since your blog linked to mine? I was having a trawl through a new stats facility on Wordpress when I discovered that little snippet of trivia. You're the second highest source of referrals to my blog over that time span, so thanks very much.

Unknown said...

I've adopted a motto from my paternal grandmother who raised a family through America's Great Depression:
Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.