2021 Fashion On The Ration Challenge

skogar

Hello Cherryfudge - great to hear that you have got the sewing machine sewing nicely. I'm afraid i can't help with what to do about the thick bits but I think the term "hand finished" sounds just right. I will have to remember that.

Laura_Elsewhere

@CapricornLass, good for you making that hard decision, and oh, well done on finding a home where they can be together. 
When my Gran went into a home (which was wonderful, for years), Dad got a huge A1 clip-frame, and the whole family sent photos, and he labelled them all with relation to his mother, ie at the top it said J's Family, and then each photo had things like "J's grand-daughter X at her 14th birthday at home in Southampton" or "J's son Y, with his wife Z, and their children A and B, on holiday in France" and the year. It was put up where Gran could see it clearly from bed or armchair.

At the bottom he did a little family-tree, just hand-written in capitals for the carers, so they could see whether X was the grandchild via J's son or daughter, etc. It meant that when, for example, the staff came in to change the bed, they could talk about Gran'\s family to her, instead of just brightly saying it was a lovely day - "it's a nice picture of your grandson there with his dog" would get Gran talking about the dogs she had as a young woman, or about her grandson, things that made her much more engaged than just polite meaningless chit-chat about the weather... 

Laura_Elsewhere

@Cherryfudge - excellent perseverance! I'm impressed - lots of folk would just have given up and got rid of the sewing machine and never tried again! 

Cherryfudge

Thank you @skogar and @Laura_Elsewhere. The finished towel would make a dog laugh but it's done and the machine is working and I can do some new crochet stitches and anyway who'd begrudge the dog its laughter?

I'm not sure why I kept at it, apart from the fact that if I want to be able to make clothes one day, this seems like the next step (albeit on a road with many other learning curves). Perhaps it's also a mixture of stubbornness and inability to see when something is too hard. I have my parents to thank for a certain amount of belief in myself and I knew there must be a way to make it happen so I suppose I used my game-playing experience to outwit it. Oh dear... outwitting a sewing machine...  

Today I discovered I had left one side with a row less of double crochet and minus a hanging loop so I added those and called it finished (again). I've also finished the little knitted cat, which is rather oddly akin to an early Mickey Mouse with its outsize ears and black face.

Now to tackle DH's jumper... again.

PipneyJane

@Cherryfudge - well done for conquering your sewing machine!   Also, thank you and @Laura_Elsewhere, for the advice regarding moving someone with dementia into a care home.  The Clan (DH’s best mate’s family) have recently made the hard decision to move their 94 year old mum into a care home.    Her memory, etc, has deteriorated considerably over the last few years.  COVID certainly didn’t help.  I will pass on your advice.  Good luck with your parents move, @CapricornLass.

After three episodes, Sewing Bee must have got to me.  Last Night, DH and I watched “When Harry Met Sally” and I found myself staring at the sleeve head on Sally’s tweed jacket, thinking “those stripes are beautifully matched”.  

- Pip

Laura_Elsewhere

One other bit of dementia suggestion, not anything I've read but jsut my own idea.... I've noticed, within my own family and friends' families, that people work hard and exhaustingly to keep on correcting the demented person's confused 'certainties'. 
Gran thought I was my father, her son - I was early-20s at the time and at first I kept correcting her, wearing skirts, make-up, long hair loose, etc., but she still obviously only saw eyes and bone structure and was quite certain I was her son, A. 
After several months of upsetting her every time I visited (most days, she was handily just up the road), I thought, blow this, and went with it. I would wear a shirt, open-necked, and tie my hair back smoothly with a side-parting to mimic Dad's youthful short-back-and-sides. 
Gran was quite happy and peacefully chatted to me, as A, talking about homework and planning the holidays, and sometimes asking me to pass her handbag and counting out five 10p coins as "two... four... six...eight... there, that's ten bob, but don't tell C, as I haven't given him anything" (C being her other son) - I would take the "ten shillings" and thank her, and next visit she would remember and ask what I had spent it on, and I would come up with plausible things like cricket ball or new nibs for my fountain pen... she was so engaged, so interested, and clearly very alert within her own world, despite that huge element of confusion: me not being my dad!
A friend's father got terribly worked up about being able to hear the trains running under their rural home, underground, and when everyone kindly explained he was imagining his auditory illusions, he got more upset and started getting shouty, horrible for everyone... I just looked at my watch one day when he commented and said in a slightly surprised tone, "oh, it's on time - that one's been running late for weeks" and he was instantly really engaged in a discussion about trains and the civil engineering reasons for punctuality problems, and we had a lovely afternoon... 

So whilst it's useful in early dementia to correct the confusions, and help the person work their brain hard to slow the progress, I think it's worth considering going along with it once it's more established... 

Not medical advice, just observation and deduction. But worth considering, I think.

thriftwizard

Truly compassionate, Laura. Having worked with the elderly for some time, I always have a sense that they are withdrawing from the world as it is (or at least, as we perceive it) and slowly entering into their own reality, for whatever reason to do with brain structures, injuries and losses, and it's a journey that only they can undertake. It's perhaps rude & confusing to keep pulling them back, though of course sometimes has to be done for their own safety. But how often do we do that for our own convenience, and because we don't want to face up to losing the competent adult that they once were, or at least seemed to be?

In other news, I think we've just spent all my mother's clothing coupons in one hit! And still have to tackle shoes... I got a phone call from her care home on Wednesday night to say, we're sorry, but she seems to have "grown out of" all of her clothes and they won't do up! It's all rather difficult at the moment because we can't take her out to look at stuff & try it on, and she's not terribly tall, and stuff can't be altered just now, so I've ordered some elderly-special stuff that she probably won't like much but will be manageable, easily-washable & do up, and found her some random-but-brighter bits from a charity shop pound rail too & posted those so they can be "quarantined". I'm going down there on Wednesday for an hour's EFC visit, so we'll have a try-on session & choose some likely shoes online. What's the betting half of it will have to be sent back?! I have no idea how the sizes come up...

Cherryfudge

@Laura_Elsewhere, that's the loveliest 'dementia story' ever. I think you are so right - we can't argue when someone is back in 1950 (or whenever), we can distract (sometimes) but there is a certain privilege to being able to go back in time with them and take part in things that were important enough to them to be imprinted in their being.

Laura_Elsewhere

Cherryfudge said:

@Laura_Elsewhere, that's the loveliest 'dementia story' ever. I think you are so right - we can't argue when someone is back in 1950 (or whenever), we can distract (sometimes) but there is a certain privilege to being able to go back in time with them and take part in things that were important enough to them to be imprinted in their being.

Oh, I gained so much background knowledge about Dad's childhood! It was lovely, in its way... 

Cherryfudge

This is a useful mini article on memory loss (sad though it is, so please don't read if you might find it upsetting) and makes the very good point that the person is still experiencing emotion, even if confused, so we need to respond to their emotional state rather focussing on where they are 'wrong' (which is, after all, real and true to them).
So for instance when I got phone calls from my mum saying she was stuck at the office and her mother would be worried, I just said I'd ring her mum for her and it had been on the news that the buses were delayed so everyone would understand why she wasn't home for tea. No point in saying 'Mum, you haven't worked there for sixty years and your Mum's been dead since 1981' when that will only cause distress, further confusion and a feeling of alienation.
A lovely older man (who used to visit his wife in the next room to my mum) would say 'It's the fog, you know' if she fretted that people hadn't been to see her. That seems to have covered lapses in her memory nicely, and was much kinder than saying 'They were here yesterday and you have forgotten' or 'They died years ago'.
I also remember seeing wonderful nursing staff reassuring an elderly hospital patient who was frantic because her husband wasn't with her. They can't have know her for long and had to find things to say that would cover all eventualities, and as far as I remember they came up with 'I expect he's on his way, the traffic is terrible, let's make a cup of tea while we wait'.