A WONDERFUL LESSON LEARNT!!!

This is worth writing in CAPITALS! 

The tailors where I did my work experience once told me that the tailors that trained him used to chew on cotton threads so that when they pricked themselves and bled a little on the garment they were working on they could take the spittal-soaked ball of cotton and dab it on the blood and it would come off. He explained that only the person's spit whose blood it was could clean the blood up.

I liked the detail as a bit of social history and a pictoral fact, and imagined them crossed legged on the table, hunched over their sewing and chewing cotton.

BUT! I have just been sewing the final stages of yet another sample for a shift, in expensive linen and all white and glorious, and I don't even know what happened, except that while I was on the machine I felt a tug on my finger and the next minute there was a large (about 5mm) blob of blood on my white linen. Panic! This was supposed to be for photographs! 

So I shoved a bundle of the thread I'd been slowly chopping of and gathering into a little pile, into my mouth and chewed and sucked and got it all moist and dabbed it on the blood, and dabbed it on the blood, and got an off-cut of linen and held it on the back and re-sucked some more thread and dabbed it on, and dabbed it on. And do you know what! It's all gone! It really has.

Amazing.