Tiny good deed for the day (topology involved)

I suppose that my regular stint serving breakfast once a week at the local soup kitchen could be counted as a good deed, but that's gotten to be such a part of my routine that it's not what I was thinking of when I patted myself on the back for a cute little job well done.   

As part of my morning at the soup kitchen, I got to fold the laundry, which is one of my favorite jobs there because it involves untangling apron strings, which is a delightful puzzle always.  In fact, I wrote a blog post earlier about how my practice with untangling apron strings helped me fix my expensive cordless blinds.  Well, this week I realized that two aprons were sewn together wrong, and the loop that goes around the neck wasn't actually attached.

Incorrectly sewn. 
The two loops should actually loop together.

I told the powers-that-be that I'd take these two aprons home to do a quick fix.  That's the small good deed I patted myself on the back for.  It's fun to fix things for other people, isn't it?

First step: use my seam ripper, a tool I love.  
Love, love, love -- it's so useful for sewing projects!

Once I disassembled the first strap, I realized how the original sewer could easily have made the stitching blunders -- figuring out how to thread the strap through the black plastic piece and the other loop was a bigger brain teaser than I thought it would be.

This seemed right while I was putting it together,
but then I realized, "nopers."

There's a type of math that studies things like knots and loops and links: it's called "topology".  I really love that subject, and this turned into a fun applied topology puzzle for me.

Next configuration.  I sewed this in place, 
then realized it was wrong, too.  Back to the seam ripper.

This was the threading pattern that did the trick.

After a few attempts, I did figure it out.  It turns out that removing the old stitches and putting the new stitches in were just as quick and easy as I thought they'd be . . .  but getting the straps into the right place between those two steps was quite a bit of mathematical maneuvering.

Phew!  All done.

And next week, I'll take back two aprons whose neck straps are both now in the right place, ready to get tangled into tricky topology knots with other aprons like the best of them.