Lessons Learned From Slow Fashion October: Mending More

​Though I’ve always had a basic understanding of sewing, mending has never been something I did much of. I remember that my mother had a mending basket, but the joke in our house was that the mending basket was where clothes went to die of neglect. It wasn’t that mending wasn’t a priority so much as there were so many other priorities that were more important. And I suspect that Mom didn’t want to spend her precious sewing time on what felt like drudgery. She’d rather sew something new and fun for herself.
 
I don’t particularly like shopping for clothes, so the Slow Fashion concept of “long worn” feels particularly relevant to me. I typically buy items that feel like “classics,’ and then proceed to wear the heck out of them. But when a shirt gets a hole or cloth wears too thin, I’ve had a tendency to give up on the garment. I’ve written before about giving my clothes new life as rag rugs, but I feel like I’ve had less success with mending. 

The thing with clothes, though, is there's always another chance to improve your skills. If your mending job goes terribly awry and results in an unwearable garment, just wait a while and you'll eventually wind up with another worn out garment to practice on. 

That's what happened to me, anyway. 

Ironically, on the same day I intentionally cut a hole in my sweater to make a pocket, I ripped a 2-inch hole in a shirt. It's not an absolute favorite, but one that I wear frequently since it's so comfortable.

I put the shirt in my queue of things to do, and let it sit there for a week, not exactly sure how I would mend it. My last couple of mending projects had gone wrong in all sorts of different ways, I and wasn't feeling too confident about my skills.

Eventually, I turned to YouTube and found a few videos that were helpful, but not exactly enlightening. But they made me feel like the repair was something I could do, at least.

One of the hurdles I think we need to jump in mending our clothes is an idea of perfection, the idea that our clothes should always be fresh and new and perfect. When we mend our clothes, there are new stitches where before there were none. A shirt gains a ridge, a pucker, or texture that wasn't there before. No matter how we try to hide it, there's a scar. 

I'm not advocating that we all become slobs or wear tattered clothing. My point is merely that mending clothes will never be brand new again, and they may no longer qualify as "Sunday best."  But most of us have a place in our lives where mended clothes can - and should - serve a purpose.

I've long adored sashiko, boro, and other visible mending techniques, and yet I struggle to incorporate them into my life. So I knew that my mending job needed to be as invisible as possible. I sewed up the hole, being careful to pick up all the loops left open by the tear. The fabric was too fine to do a real Kitchener stitch, but that was what I attempted in order to make the repair less visible and to give the mend more structural integrity. 

When I finished mending the hole, I ironed a piece of lightweight fusible interfacing over the repair, which will hopefully strengthen the area where the hole was. Though the tear was two inches long, it was near the armpit and not very visible. In fact, I had a hard time finding it when I went to do the repair. And of course, using thread that matched the print makes the repair itself less visible.

Hopefully as I continue to wear the shirt, the repair will hold up. But what I've really learned is the importance of practicing a new skill, and trying again and again until I get it right. And that the changing character of a worn and mended garment isn't a bad thing - just something different. 

xx,

​Pamela