CNN article "Making toilet paper, eating less: How one single mom plans to weather inflation."
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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I told my parents that by learning to refurbish old things and learning skills like how to sew my own clothes, I was actually gaining necessary skills
They still think I was joking
Hilarious to me they think that way. Im a dude in my 40s and when I was a kid it was ingrained in me that I needed to know how to sew because repairing clothes was a necessary skill. At minimum I needed to be able to make a shirt and pants and to fix buttons. I took two years of home ec my last year of middle school and first year of high school to learn to sew and make clothes.
I learned to sew in middle school.
When I enlisted in the navy, I was handed a sewing kit and told I better learn how to use it because uniform repairs were my responsibility.
Still I hear grown men mocking any male why knows or wants to learn a basic skill.
Clothing really is a thing we have an overabundance of and you can very easily dress yourself with affordable thrift store items or even donations. Of course sewing can help getting more out of it, but it‘s not exactly a cheap alternative. Refurbishing interior or even simple electric devices like lamps is pretty easy to learn though and a very useful life skill precisely because we throw away so many things that still have value to others.
This has slowly become less and less true.
The big corpo thrift stores have long since had pricing that exceeds reasonable: a 10 year old shirt with some event printed on it is not $9.99, when I can go to any of a dozen retailers and just... buy a new one, often for less.
Smaller ones aren't quite there yet, but smaller ones also tend to put more effort into fishing anything good in their donation streams out and posting it on ebay, so you end up with a store full of what is, quite literally, just trash.
The last wardrobe refresh I did I ended up buying almost entirely new or used from like eBay because the pricing at Goodwill, Salvation Army, and a couple of local thrift stores were at best similar and at worse wildly stupid.
The days when you could get a $0.99 shirt and $1.99 pants if you went on the correct color day are pretty much entirely dead, because capitalists going to capital, even if they're literally profiting directly off stuff people are giving them for free.
Darning socks and replacing buttons/zippers are absolutely cost effective unless you’re making money money. Depending on the size/shape/location of tears in other pieces of clothing it might be, but it takes approximately one minute to sew a button back on and once you get the hang of it, under ten for socks or a zipper, working without a sewing machine.
Sewing your own clothing is a totally different ballgame. There you need patterns or significant planning time, and fabric is not exactly cheap. I’m sure people still do it by hand, but that’s hella time consuming and much more difficult than with a machine, which is also an investment (though you can often find them second hand at very affordable prices).
I run a cut/sew shop. Clothing is a small section of the trade of sewing.