Sewing

A button falls off your kameez two hours before you have to leave for a wedding. The darzi shop in your gali is closed. Your mother is at her sister's. Your phone tells you a new kameez online costs four thousand rupees. The button is sitting on the floor, perfectly fine. The thread is in a tin in the dressing table drawer. The needle is in there too. The only thing missing is the skill, and that takes ninety seconds to learn.

Three things you need: a needle (thicker than a pin, with a clear eye at one end), thread that matches the kameez (white for white, black for black; if the colour is not exact, choose darker over lighter), and a small pair of scissors or a nail clipper. Total cost: under fifty rupees from any general store, kiryana, or Shaheen Chemist. Keep them in a small tin or matchbox in your desk drawer. This is your sewing kit.

Threading the needle is half the battle. Cut a length of thread roughly the distance from your fingertip to your elbow. Wet the cut end on your tongue and twist it between thumb and forefinger to make a sharp point. Push that point through the eye of the needle. Pull through about ten centimetres, then bring the two ends of the thread together and tie a small double knot at the bottom. The double knot is what stops the thread pulling straight through the cloth.

Sewing on a four hole button. Lay the kameez flat. Position the button where its old marks show on the cloth. From the inside of the kameez, push the needle up through the cloth and through one hole of the button. Cross diagonally to the opposite hole and push the needle back down through both the button and the cloth. Repeat that diagonal four times. Now do the second diagonal four times so the stitches make an X across the button. Bring the needle up under the button but not through it, wrap the thread around the threads under the button five times to make a small shank, then push the needle back through to the inside and tie off with two small knots. Cut the thread close. The button is on for life.

Hemming a shalwar that has come undone. Turn the shalwar inside out. Find the loose section. Fold the cloth back along the original crease (you can see the line where it was sewn before). Take stitches that go through only the folded layer and a single thread of the outer cloth, never all the way through. The stitches should be slanted, about half a centimetre apart. From the right side, a good hem is invisible: you should see no thread at all, just the smooth fall of the cloth. Tie off every five centimetres so a single broken stitch does not unravel the whole hem.

Patching a hole in a kameez. For a hole smaller than a one rupee coin, the easiest method is the iron on patch from any darzi shop or fabric store: cut a piece of fusible interfacing two centimetres bigger than the hole on every side, place it on the inside of the kameez sticky side toward the cloth, lay a thin cotton cloth over it, press a hot iron on top for fifteen seconds. Now from the outside, with thread that matches, do small zig zag stitches across the hole; you are sewing the patch and the cloth together. For a bigger hole, take a square of matching cloth from a sleeve seam allowance or an old kameez of the same colour, and stitch it on with running stitches around all four edges.