Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Fusion

I feel like we’re sort of back. Our fire didn’t make me a better person although I look like I’m more organized because I have a lot less stuff. The stuff I have is the stuff I use, am going to use, am going to lose weight so that it'll fit, etc.


I’m writing about two pair of wool pants that I bought. I’m too fat for them, but, since they’re winter pants, it’s all about what’s possible. I believe that I will eventually fit into these pants in a way that I don’t believe that’ll I’ll ever be organized, won’t ever want a cigarette, will be good at follow-up, and will be able to measure things accurately, all of the time, in every circumstance.


I lost my measuring confidence because I pretty much stopped doing it and also because I recently hemmed some curtains for French Doors and the bottom hems are not the right lengths for the bottom rods. Also, they’re only sort of hemmed because I bought that fusion stuff that you iron on to fuse fabric and it is harder to work with than I thought it would be. It’s probably because I didn’t use any straight pins. If you’ve never used this stuff, I highly recommend it. It really does fuse things together by melting them that way.



I’ve been using it to fuse all kinds of things. I can tell you that it won’t work on a zipper or at least one of those nylon ones. That’s because to fuse stuff you have to have a really hot iron to melt the fuse membrane. And it has to be between two pieces of fabric otherwise it turns into this hard stuff that you knew for sure was once sticky. If you’re not careful, and you get it on an ironing board you can pick it off with your nail. But if you get it into the tracks of a zipper, it looks like that zipper is toast, although you could probably pick it out with a needle but it would take a long time.


I think I’m all caught up in fusing things and fixing things because I have my summer clothes back and a lot of them have little stapled tags on them attesting to my slovenliness. When fire helper guys took our clothes they cleaned them, mostly de-smoked them and analyzed them. That’s maybe not the right word but they really did go over them. If there’s a teeny, tiny stain, or an itty bitty pulled button hole, there’s an arrow affixed and it says that it was damaged prior to treatment. I’m not going into specifics here but good advice is to toss any underwear that you own that may have a pulled or separating waist band elastic. (I know this sounds like some mother who once told you to always wear clean underwear in case you got hit by a car, but that and this advice is probably good anyway.)


Because I only recently discovered fusing things I don’t know if it would have worked when I could have had a need for it. Girl Scout badges on sashes comes to mind, although if every single scout mother simply used safety pins this wouldn’t be an issue, but I can tell you for sure, having lived in NY’s burbs for more than 20 years that’s there’s always going to be at least one mother who’s going to sew them on anyway and there’s not anything you can do about that.


Come to think of it, there’s not much you can do about most things. That’s okay and probably for the best. You just have to make sure that you’re fused to the place where you live. That’s what happened to me after our fire. I’m fused here. It’s good, I hope it gets better and if it doesn’t, that’s fine.

2 comments:

Nancy G said...

Liz, I love fusing! I do it with quilting all the time. Try Mylar over the ironing board to protect the board. Still probably wouldn't work with plastic.

Nancy G said...

People think I love to sew because I quilt, but I don't. If a zipper needs fixing, it goes to someone else or I get rid of whatever needs fixing, after it sits for months (okay, maybe even years) waiting to be fixed.