I don’t really like mending, but I wouldn’t exactly say I dislike it either. My experience of mending lies somewhere on the spectrum between pleasure and nuisance. I feel some satisfaction once the repair is complete, but I also dread having to make it. Mending is definitely not something I prioritize, but I probably should.

Despite my general softness as a person, I am quite hard on my clothes. I also hold onto cherished clothing until it is literally falling apart. Especially during quarantine, when every outfit is a ‘day off’ outfit, you’ll find me in a sweater with elbow holes, shoes with the soles peeling off, and pants where the inner thigh has worn through or ripped open.

Knowing this, you’d think that my philosophies on reuse and the power of wearables- paired with my affinity for needlework- would mean I’m the type who often spends the evenings mending my beloved, hard worn clothing. Up until recently, you would be wrong. In fact, leading up to a recent series of mending projects, I mostly just wore garments with holes and stains and tears.

Over the last several years, the sewing world has started to embrace what was once considered an arduous chore. I’ve seen all sorts of interesting tools developed to make mending more fun, more accessible. The highly popular “visible mending” of today takes the form of bright patchwork on worn coats, or japanese boro inspired big stitch squares on blue jeans, or colorful mini woven tapestries on humble socks. Somebody laser cut a replica of a 1950’s “darning machine” and multiple books on the subject pop up from time to time in my instagram feed.

As mentioned before, quarentine has seen me spending a lot of time in my ‘comfy clothes’, the neighborhood where more of my beloved, holey, stained, and motheaten clothes reside. And paying a bit more attention to their state. I imagine many folks at home may have had the same reaction to something in their life they’d be neglecting.

I have had this blue poly blend sweatshirt as long as I remember. The earliest documentation I have of it dates to 2005 when I was a freshman in college. I don’t remember buying it, but it likely came from a thrift store as most of my clothing has from age 18 on. In this picture I was laughing at something. Yes that is my real hair and yes I have a nosebleed. College was wild.

A polaroid of me sitting in a chair, laughing, with my giant bleach blonde mop of college hair. I have a bloody nose and I have no idea why. First dry winter in Boston, perhaps? I am wearing the blue sweatshirt and I believe also a necklace that featured a piece of resin with a giant ant inside it. I was in art school, obviously.

I wear this sweatshirt a lot. Always have. It’s got a lot of miles on it. And it’s really started to show it in recent years. Another quarantine habit I’ve picked up again in a big way is working on needlework in the evenings. After finishing a sweater and several needlepoint projects, I decided that I really needed to fix this sweatshirt if I was going to keep wearing it much longer.

The folded up sweatshirt was sitting on a work table in my studio when I was organizing some knit scraps, including a few leftover from natural dye projects. I’m a big sucker for complementary colors, and the saturated orange and yellow palette positively popped next to the bright blue sweater. I grabbed some coordinating embroidery floss and packed everything up in a tote bag to bring to the house.

I find colors very exciting and motivating. The idea of mending this sweatshirt with matching blue thread didn’t appeal to me in the slightest… but turning it into a sea upon which various orange and yellow hued islands would float in abstraction? Very exciting. I began cutting out slightly amorphous shapes that followed the general size and angle of each hole and attached them on using a buttonhole stitch.

A close up of the wrist of my sweatshirt, where most of the damage was. I’m stitching around the edges of each knit applique scrap with an embroidered buttonhole stitch.

I worked my way around the sweatshirt slowly while sitting by the fire and watching old seasons of Rupaul’s Drag Race. It was suprisingly pleasant, considering it was mending. Plus I got to play with fun shapes and colors! With a conceptual and decidedly ‘fashion’ result. Maybe this is the trick to making mending more palatable? Maybe all those visible mending enthusiasts are on to something…

Me in my studio wearing the sweatshirt, a visible smattering of oddly shaped patches adorn its lower half.

Once all the major holes were mended, the sweatshirt went right back into rotation. As evidenced by the photo above, there was no time for staged pictures. This little garment went right back to work. And now when I wear it, I experience a bright little pop of color. It gives me a little blip of excitement while trudging through the snow to clean up after my dog or sweeping the kitchen floor for what feels like the 80th time in one week (it wasn’t…time just doesn’t exist for me anymore). I hope these little mends give the sweatshirt a little more longevity. Eventually I might cover up the few remaining paint stains (this is my go-to wall painting sweatshirt, as you can imagine) and add some patches to the thinning shoulders, but for now this will do.

A flat lay view of the mended sweatshirt, with arms folded so you can see all the lovely bright little patches. My cat, buckaroo, has decided to intrude on the shot because cats cannot resist napping on garments laid flat on a bed. Ask any cat.

Do you like mending? Do you need incentive, whether creative or otherwise, to repair your beloved garments?

Visible Mending