visible mending

Visible mending is a book for anyone fed up with throwaway culture and fast fashion (300,000 tons of clothing ends up on landfills each year). Pick up a needle and rediscover forgotten joys of visible mending. Like embroidering motifs over holes, in old jeans.

Repair What You Wear has free online guides to help mend tears, replace zippers, darn holes in socks, patch elbows on jumpers and sew on missing buttons. Steamery Sewing Kit is sold in a roll case and contains scissors, a seam ripper, fabric pen and threads, sewing pins and needles, safety pins, a metal thimble, measuring tape, quick patches, buttons and a needle threader.

The book features 12 core techniques, 10 key stitches and 12 projects, and also explores why we should mend, and how to mend a variety of fabrics. It demystifies mending techniques through a directory of stitches, and also offers tips on repairing clothes you love – from stitching over tears to using embroidery, patching and darning.

Every culture that has a history of textiles, also has a history of mending. In more recent years, our relationship with mending has changed, it plays a smaller role in our lives, and in quite a few cases, no role at all. You don’t need a lot of equipment for needlework, one thing I would recommend is a quality needle. I store my needles in a needle book, to keep their tips from getting damaged. Running stitch is the most basic you will use in hand sewing, it resembles a continuous line of little dashes.

Arounna Khonnoraj is an artist and maker in Toronto (Canada), where she emigrated from Laos as a young child. After taking a Masters in Fine Arts, she found her current focus in fibre arts. She and her husband run a printing and embroidery studio.

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