I’m not sure of the first time I heard of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ work, though I can recall clearly watching a video of her “Touch Sanitation” work at a crowded opening of the 2024 show at All Street Gallery.

Mending is maintenance and Ukeles wrote the manifesto of Maintenance Art in 1969, asking “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” Most known as the artist in residence of the NYC Sanitation department since 1977; in her manifesto Ukeles reimagined her daily care work through the lens of her performance art practice. Every diaper change as art. She extended that thinking from her personal acts of care (parenting, cleaning the home) to all the service and maintenance work that keeps society alive, like that of sanitation.

The early part of the documentary felt to me to be ecstatic – the development of her maintenance art philosophy, her jumpsuits bright against the landfill, her children reminiscing fondly of their Greenwich Village childhood. The IFC theater I sat in was full and someone even ducked in partway through and perched in the aisle. Energy was high and the audience was with it.

The film had great footage and good context-building around her more well-known works like “Touch Sanitation” where Ukeles shook hands with every sanitation worker in New York City over the course of a year, thanking them for keeping the city alive. It’s no coincidence, the documentary makes clear, that the performance took place in 1979, not long after the bankrupt city laid off thousands of sanitation workers and the subsequent strike brought relations with the city residents to a low. (By the way, for more 1975 NYC bankruptcy footage, my brother loved the recent doc Drop Dead City.)

I love how she brought in others into her maintenance art practice – like the maids, security guards and repair staff at the financial district building 55 Water Street in her 1976 piece “I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day.” She asked these collaborators to dedicate one hour of their shift to “Maintenance Art”, which would look from the outside exactly like their typical work.

She kept pushing to explore new forms – like the series of ballets she choreographed with industrial service equipment including “Snow workers ballet” in Japan in 2003 and 2012.

I watched the trailer again just now as I embedded it and I got chills.

Ukeles introduces her manifesto with (as I recall it) a reference to Duchamp, she refers to him (I think) as one of the patriarchal art forebearers and also someone who pushed the boundary of what counts as art.

I’m no expert in Duchamp, but I did recently see the sprawling retrospective at MoMA (up through August 22nd). I crossed wires with the people I was meant to meet and so I ended up perusing the show alone and I found myself thinking of Mierle as I did.

Duchamp (for those like myself who never took art history), first attracted attention with the painting “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” at the Armory.

The painting attracted tremendous tabloid attention at the time – people loved to make fun of it, and it’s hard to not think of social media while reading the newspaper clippings at the show – and it made Duchamp, then an unknown, instantly famous. Having found fame with painting, he was eager to immediately reinvent.

I thought of Mierle first while looking at Duchamp’s “3 standard stoppages” piece, made by dropping a meter of sewing thread on a canvas and tracing where it fell. I noted that he used sewing thread, of all things, a potential raw material for maintenance. Duchamp wanted to make art with the mind, not paint and to escape the means of expression traditionally associated with art.

Duchamp’s most important contribution to art, he believed, was the concept of readymades – the idea that an artist can make work through creating context, rather than creating the object himself. His most famous readymade perhaps is “The Fountain” a porcelain urinal, he displayed as an art object.

There is a lot to know about Duchamp, judging by the hefty museum book I contemplated in the gift shop. Most of the things in that book I know not, but it was clear from the portraits of him in the show that he was part of and responding to an artistic community. There were many photos by Man Ray, for example, and I particularly liked the portrait by Florine Stettheimer because I particularly like Florine Stettheimer (in part because my mother loves her work and so I think of her when I see it.)

It’s a curatorial choice to include this work by his peers and about him, not just what he was creating.

While the ecstatic first half of the Maintenance Artist included references to other performance artists whose work Ukeles was seeing in galleries Downtown, the second half of the film dragged for me, because the focus of the documentary makers narrows to her thoughts on legacy. The legacy topic in the film comes down to her sorting through archives in her Sanitation Department office. Not to discount an interest in legacy or the complexity of handling artistic archives – my parents are working artists in their 70s, I’ve discussed art archives a lot in my time. According to an interview with the film-maker Toby Perl Freilich, the first scenes shot for the film were these scenes of Ukeles sorting through her archives for the Smithsonian.

The second half was a drag because the way the documentary frames her legacy is only through archival recognition by institutions, rather than through the movement she created. I realized on the train ride home from the movie that the documentary doesn’t reference any other maintenance artists. The 2024 “Art at Work” show made up of work by other artists-in-residence at sanitation departments across the country makes clear that she does have a legacy of influence indeed.

Art is context, according to Duchamp, but the MoMA exhibit also has no references to the many successors who played off Duchamp’s ready-made concept. When I go to a museum with my parents, I feel lucky to hear their off-the-cuff lecture, giving the background story behind the piece we’re looking at – their peers, the controversy, the gossip.

Maybe it’s narrow-minded or missing the point to conceive of Ukeles’ sphere of influence as artists, instead of her many sanitation collaborators.

One of my favorite of Ukeles’ pieces featured in the film was “Transfer”, a performance about the labor in art institutions and the artist as conduit – in the work, a museum maintenance worker teaches her how he cleans a vitrine containing a 7000 year old mummy. Ukeles affixes an artist statement to the vitrine and now the museum conservator must care for the vitrine instead of the maintenance worker, former expert in the act. Context is everything.

Did you see the documentary or the show at MOMA? Would love to hear what you thought! The movie does not seem to be on any streaming services at the moment but the Duchamp show is up until August 22nd. We will be back next time with an interview with Anne Warren, founder of the reclaimed yarn knitwear brand Next Season.

I’m a big believer in closet rotations — shifting things a few times a year between under the bed storage to my closet. I like having fewer things at hand while getting dressed at any given time and I also find that putting things away for 3-6 months makes clothes feel fresh even when I’ve owned them for years.

While doing the rotations this month, I encountered a few unwearable things and wanted to share the satisfactions of several small fixes:

1. One raincoat with a torn placket — I fixed this raincoat before, the placket, or where the snaps are attached in the front was torn, I suspect because I own the ‘lightweight’ model from the raincoat brand and the snaps are too strong for the material. Shout out to Eva Joan for the fix. I’m so pleased to be able to fasten this coat again during spring rains.

2. Two pairs jeans — One had a rip in the leg and another a broken zipper. Shout out again to Eva Joan here. Very helpfully for moving things out of my mending basket and back into my closet — my husband opened a coffee shop with friends right by Eva Joan (swing by so good if you’re ever in the West Village!).

3. A onesie with a tear on the thigh — It’s too small for my baby, but I wanted to fix before passing it on. It’s got a cute neck ruffle & was otherwise in fine condition.

4. One green wool sweater pictured above — Worn by my uncle Jim as a toddler, my older brother, me and now both my kids. I love that it already had visible mends from previous generations. Are layers of repair the true definition of heirloom?

Anything on your too mend list or things you’ve recently repaired? I’d love to hear about it!

The seeds I planted last week are beginning to sprout and I’m feeling ready to write once more about mends.

I interviewed Aliya about her textile practice and its intersection with her parenting one evening after bedtime. We talked while she cut out patterns for a child’s quilted jacket (that she planned to make re-using a ripped parka of her own, naturally).

“Parenting is a big part of my life right now. I’m a little torn on it – being an artist is really important to me, but it’s been very back burner for the past 5 years. I still have all these art ideas and I try to act, inspired by a book I read about not letting ideas sit too long...”

Aliya continued to cut out the paper pattern pieces.

The Butterfly Stroller

“That was key for me. Like, you know what? I’m gonna make art wherever I’m at. And right now where I’m at is the stroller – that’s where I’m at a lot.”

Reader: Are you familiar with the UPPAbaby Vista stroller, Vista 2 model most specifically, when outfitted with two toddler seats? If not, picture a sort of stroller mini-van, with a cavernous basin that can comfortably hold a mini scooter and a load of groceries. This stroller model, I must mention, a soreness sense memory rising in my shoulders, is also heavy when encumbered with two children.

Aliya scored her particular stroller on Craigslist, and after a yearish of constant use, it was falling apart. While pushing the stroller she saw the holes in the canopy or the loose handlebar stitching and would think “all of these are fabric/textile things that I know how to fix.” This observation competed with another internal narrative to “not spend time on it and to spend time instead on something ‘important.’”

“But,” Aliya noted, “I was looking at [this stroller] every single day.”

Here is where I will surprise no one by saying I am a mending enabler. One night Aliya texted me asking what I thought she should do – she had a vision of a big red fun canopy buuuut also wanted to resell the stroller in a year or two. Any guesses on what I advised?

Aliya noted while we still sat on the basement rug and maybe sipped a little orange wine, “I really appreciated your response – ‘have fun with it and tell the person who buys it, that they can buy a new canopy themself if they don’t like it.’”

Her younger child now refers to it as a “Butterfly Stroller” and Aliya reports that she feels less apologetic about the stroller’s size while pushing the stroller as a huge physical object out in the world. “I just went for it and let myself have a lot of fun with it,” Aliya said. “Let it be an art form, even though it’s not something I’m going to put on my portfolio.”

(It must be noted as a brief aside – while we are here picking on the UPPAbaby Vista as a large stroller – I do not believe that there is a double stroller in the world small enough to cause no inconvenience. It is their nature to disrupt.)

“Making art with the kids (age 5 and 2) is sometimes art and sometimes just childcare,” Aliya says. “The stroller is somewhere in the middle.”

Unfinished Edges

Aliya first learned to sew in middle school from her mother, motivated to hem her pants and customize every band t-shirt that came her way.

Aliya uses her great aunt’s machine to sew and her serger is a hand-me-down too. She learned to sew by doing; started making patterns by tracing the clothes she already had.

While sitting around the sewing space in the basement Aliya told me a story she’d told me before – you know, some stories are like that, core to how you see yourself?

In this particular story, Aliya was a teenager and had sewn a dress to wear for Thanksgiving. She was proud of the dress – a self-drafted pattern, nice fabric, she’d taken extra care in its crafting. She’d made a test dress first, for example and fixed all the little mistakes in her pattern. She felt proud to tell her Nana “Look, I made that dress,” only to hear in response “Oh nice” and then after her Nana turned over the hem and investigated, “you didn’t finish all the edges.”

This critique sticks with Aliya – she doesn’t like finishing inside edges – it’s still true. She dreads snipping all the threads once a project is done; prefers the experimental parts most. I think it’s this flexibility though that allows her to approach found materials with an open mind and heart.

She’s now fixing a pair of pants she made for her older child as we talk. This – she notes – of the belt in the pants – this is a buckle from [her husband]’s shoes that fell apart, “I just loved the buckles!” She finishes the fix and turns to another pair of kids pants that need a waistband elastic to be finished – “part of a concept of turning old sweaters into cozy pants. The legs are sweater arms.”

I live with a remake of Aliya’s – there’s a gorgeous floor-grazing curtain in my room she sewed for me on commission out of a tattered but sentimental bedspread and some pillowcases from my Grammy. The curtain serves a functional purpose (providing privacy in the bedroom from a large window into the hall) but also acts as the primary room decor. “I love curtains,” Aliya muses. She actually also made a curtain backdrop for her wedding that now lives behind her couch. Aliya notes that curtains are like pillows, in that they are both soft sculptures with a purpose.

The Butterfly Stroller Postscript

Aliya did, she stressed, finish all the inside edges of the Butterfly Stroller. But unfortunately, she also went on a family trip to Florida soon after, and in transit the stroller got pretty wrecked. “So now,” Aliya says, “it’s just another mend.”

Find more of Aliya’s work here featuring more photos of incredible pillows.

I interviewed Kemp while wearing a blue button-down Kemp had reworked, adding an “arch” hem my mom eyed quizzically. (More on that shirt in a bit.)

I ended the call with Kemp full of energy and with a recommendation for an Italian ‘70s ‘giallo’ movie I watched later that night. (“The Red Queen Kills Seven Times”, available on tubi, if you’re in the market for a film on two sisters who inherit a haunted castle.)

Who is Laurs Kemp if you’re not yet in the know? Kemp began her career with an apparel studies degree. After a bit of corporate design and a bit of retail she started selling vintage and her own reworks online. On the way Kemp kept hitting a wall working the way she wanted to. She was making designs from new fabric and “then figured out that it’s hard to source fabric in a sustainable way.” Kemp made clothes from deadstock fabric and found that limiting too. She’d been reworking for herself since she was young and then started testing doing it at scale. The pandemic inspired her to start teaching others how to do the same.

The name “rework designer,” Kemp noted, doesn’t feel entirely right. “I could be reworking couches” but upcycling didn’t fully fit her either. Clearly what she is doing is designing. Kemp’s work mixes menswear and lingerie influences, historical references, found objects and humor, often working in contrasting black and white.

Kemp creates aesthetic coherence out of what she calls ‘base things’ from thrift stores. “Base” meaning they can be found endlessly, in her local thrift or yours. Kemp’s particular objects of focus being blazers and button-downs. (But she does fun things with gloves too.)

“Truly I would love to just do a rework book dedicated to button-up; I have a hundred ideas,” Kemp says.

Kemp shares her rework concepts with the world in three different ways. First Kemp sells clothes she sourced and reworked, second she offers “rework services”, where she will rework something a customer sends in, and third, Kemp publishes a lot of tutorials of many of the same reworks on Patreon with some tutorials trickling down to Youtube and Tiktok too. (I want to try out the Puff Embroidery tutorial! I have been slowly building up my sewing machine skills. Slowly…so slowly that I might actually order a puff embroidery rework from Kemp herself before I take on my own…)

But let’s get back to my reworked shirt. The button down I had Arch-ed, is Ralph Lauren, sourced second-hand online. The shirt’s material that feels nice on the skin (100% cotton!), but I didn’t love the shape on me and rarely wore it. It’s a men’s shirt I bought intending to wear oversized, but the shirt was oddly closely fitted over the top of my pants when I hoped it would billow.

I was about to get rid of it when Kemp signed up for Substack, and after reading her August film diaries, I found myself perusing Kemp’s “rework menu” and mailing my Polo shirt over to her in Portland to become an “Arch.”

An important aside on the film diaries before we return to my shirt: movies are Kemp’s “first love…or maybe second if fashion is first.” She constantly has a movie on in the studio; often watching four movies a day. “I’ll usually watch an old Hollywood movie or something in the morning and then maybe a 70s movie. Once I’m done sewing, in the evening I’ll watch a foreign language movie.” (She keeps it in English while sewing.) Kemp is an avid Letterboxd-er and loves nothing more than recommending movies to friends.

Back to the shirt again: Kemp’s been making the “Arch” style for at least 6 years, originally riffing on the shape of a codpiece, or corsetry.

I’ve worn my reworked shirt more in the past few weeks since I received it from Kemp, than in the past three or four years prior. Before the rework, I regretted ordering the shirt wherever I saw it. Now it feels silly and fun.

This is exactly what Kemp hopes. “I love the idea of buying things that are less desirable and figuring out ways to make them interesting again.”

She doesn’t just riff on blazers or shirts, she plays off what she finds. After snipping out many shoulder pads from things she reworked, Kemp realized that, “shoulder pads are basically a bustier cup, so I’ve been doing bralettes from those or appliqueing the shoulder pad to the front of the top as like sort of a faux bustier cup.”

There are one-offs: a set of long sheer scarves from a liquidated local vintage store were transformed by Kemp into skirts; vintage elastic turned into a cage bra. Then there are rework ideas Kemp returns to again and again.

“I love the idea of upsizing,” Kemp says. “How often are we in our closet? And say, ‘oh, this almost fits. It’s so frustrating.” So Kemp creates vents or lace-up seams that make things adjustable and wearable again. The lace-up detail is functional – the blazer or the shirt is bigger than before – but it’s also that detail that adds something more.

“As soon as you give me a problem like that, my brain’s like, ooh, wait, we can make this interesting,” says Kemp. And she keeps finding new ways to do so – showing me drawings from her studio of the button-down reworks she’s got on the menu – and the many more that she wants to add soon. It’s truly a book’s worth.

Thank you so much for the interview Kemp! Happy to be back with more mends and menders after an (extended) summer break. Always looking for more inspiration on how to love the things I own for longer.

A small aside on the titular “phreaking” – not a misspelling of “freaking” – it’s a reference to the subculture of phone hackers. I highly recommend the book “Exploding the Phone” if the topic is new to you and sounds of interest. Phreakers were a group of people interested in exploring with – and reworking – the settings of phones, in the era when “Ma Bell” or the Bell System was a monopoly dominating telecommunications in the United States. I find phreakers just as interesting as I find Kemp’s clothes!

Kristen has worn a few career hats – a writer, a professional dancer, a university administrator. When she suffered a significant loss a few years ago she found she couldn’t return to the same kind of office work she was doing previously.

In our phone conversation, Kristen empathetically prepared me that she was going to share a very hard thing and so I’ll do the same. It’s a very very very hard thing. Kristen’s teenage daughter died in an accident.

Not sure what to do next, Kristen moved home to help her father as he recovered from wrist surgery. He runs a lighting business in Connecticut – shout out to John from Wallingford Lamp & Shade, a most wonderful Instagram presence! John thought Kristen might only help out in the shop, but while there, Kristen asked him to start teaching her the craft.

For months, Kristen lived a gentle schedule of learning as she and her parents grieved their shared loss, “helping each other move through the most impossible thing to survive.”

Kristen’s father's teaching came out of his years of lamp expertise. Her grandfather had a moving company and John started working for one of the businesses’ frequent customers, an antiques dealer, when he was 19 or 20. While in antiques, John learned all about restoration. He eventually ran a metal refinishing shop and later turned to lamp restoration.

The lights that customers bring into Wallingford Lamp & Shade are often antiques. Former gas lamps to be converted to electric, beautiful old brass fixtures, Tiffany style lamps that need to be cleaned and rewired – these are some of Kristen’s favorites she’s worked on.

“In Connecticut, there were a lot of small manufacturing shops of stained glass or reverse painted glass fixtures, of the same style and same time as Tiffany. The artistry and craftsmanship is really breathtaking to see. People would sit with an artist and work together on the design.”

After the period of learning in Wallingford, Kristen moved back to New York to work at another lighting shop focusing on restoration of institutional lighting – pieces from famous old buildings rather than lights from private homes.

Starting to work in restoration, Kristen was surprised by how much she enjoys the work’s pace and anti-multi-tasking nature.

“Sometimes it will take me three or four days just to clean a fixture and take it apart. There's no way to tell how long it's going to take because you don't know what kind of shape [the lamp] is in until you actually get it apart and check the integrity of each piece. If something is broken, maybe it has to be sent out to be replicated; find someone to make a mold of it. It could be months or even years for the restoration to be done. It surprises me that I'm okay with having to just sit with something and however long it might take to clean it is how long it takes.”

The care, the rhythm of the work, even the need to wear intense masks or PPE while sitting near coworkers has been unexpectedly a gift in a time of loss. While working, Kristen has also found herself meditating on the path the materials took to her hands.

“These are all materials that had their own life, right? Glass is made of sand, which is made of tiny marine skeletons. When I look at old lamps and the life that went into making a piece of glass or what was compressed to create the ore that was then mined and poured into a mold to make a brass fixture. As anything else that was alive, we're just part of that. We're not greater than it or less than it.”

Thinking about the history of the materials in a lamp you own might make you wish to keep it in your home for longer. Kristen has some expert advice on caring for your lamps.

How you might keep your lamp in top shape:

• If your light is flickering or there’s any hesitation as you turn it on and off, take the light to a professional to have the wiring examined.

• You can use a Swiffer duster to keep your lampshade clean.

• Skip using cleaners like Windex on your lamp – just dust it off. The cleaner will leave a build up and harm the integrity of the finish.

• Metal patinas – learn to love them. Kristen notes: “Things age. People age. Why is that a bad thing? Their characters change over time and there's value to that. It tells the story of what it is, and where it's been, and the time that it has had in your possession, which is part of the story of you.”

Thank you so much for sharing your story and your knowledge Kristen!

Sidebar: In addition to being a lighting restorer, Kristen is also a writer and recently launched a very cool new broadsheet-based journal called slips slips. I got to attend the launch party a few weeks back, though sadly missed most of the readings due to a total meltdown of the L train. I’ve loved perusing the oversized issue while sipping coffee in the morning. For any writers reading: slips slips is accepting submissions for issue #2!

It was nice, as I spoke with , to hear about her similar mental divides for clothing purposes and the way a fix shifted a pair of pants from one section to another.

The backstory

Róisín wrote in with a mend of a particularly well-fitting pair of vintage Levi’s that she picked up on Park Street in Bristol while visiting a friend. She’s a Master’s student at Falmouth University, studying sustainable fashion.

The mend(s)

Just a week after she first got the pants, she flipped over in a “proper playground kid moment” and ripped the knee.

That was six years ago and she did a bit of sashiko stitching over a piece of scrap fabric to cover up the l-shaped rip, and continued wearing them. Róisín hadn’t done much sewing at that point.

Another hole opened up on the left side of the butt, and she fixed it with a simple functional patch from one piece of fabric.

Over the past two or three years though, she’s been teaching herself how to sew, mostly using YouTube videos and patterns bought on Etsy. Since the jeans have been mended now a few times, they are a physical manifestation of this learning.

One recent day Róisín was cycling around town wearing these jeans. She “got home and [she] realized there was a hole in the butt. How long was that there for?”

Róisín remembered a pair of patched pants she saw as a part of a workshop course at Fashion and Textiles Museum in London, and set about doing a repair inspired by it.

Instead of just using one big square of fabric, she layered a number of smaller pieces to create an effect that was less “boxy” and flowed better around her body. It also felt more durable.

The colors of the patching also played off of some embroidery on the top of the pocket she had done with a friend from her uni course, about five years back.

After the mend

The functional left-side butt patch changed the jeans from favorites she wore quite frequently to ones that felt fit only for the “scruffier” places.

After the layered patch fix on the right, the pants shifted back towards something she’d “wear to the pub.” As Róisín said, yes “these are worn and stuff, but, I've put intention into them.”

She’d now like to redo the patch on the left to make them feel even more like her, and so the jeans will continue to evolve to reflect Róisín’s use of them, as well as her continued textile learnings.

“Looking back at some of the sewing I did like a couple years ago – some of it was so terrible. But also, it's quite nice. It's quite nice knowing that I've since improved. I’ve got new knowledge that I can look back and go, wow, I know how to do that, so much better now.”

What’s next in the mending pile?

Róisín said she has a beautiful vintage pinafore dress she’s got to mend quick before a gig tomorrow. Generally, she likes doing her mends in a big job lot, and she takes her hand sewing outside to a garden in some good weather.

Thanks so much Róisín! Looking forward to more good-mending-outside weather for you and me both in the weeks to come! Róisín has recently started a substack herself — read a recent post on flax below:

Róisín

Thinking about Flax

Linen is the thread and fabric made of flax fibre, from the plant species linum usitatissimum– meaning ‘most useful’, reflecting its multiple use for fibre, straw, seed and oil. Just looking to the etymology of linen reveals how widespread this fibre once was: from the latin…

Read more

a year ago · 1 like · Róisín Henman-Kyle

Do you have a recent mend you’d like to share? Submit it here. Next we’ll hear from Kristen in Brooklyn about lighting restoration. Our current season of On the Mends will run through the start of summer & then we’ll take another summer hiatus over July and August.

Today, we’re going to hear from Elaine, an On the Mends reader who I talked to on the phone from Seattle.

Elaine reached out with a story about a sweater her late mother-in-law knit – and the journey she took to fix it.

Sweater magic

Elaine’s mother-in-law was a left-handed knitter who just seemed to know how to “make [sweaters that] fit without measuring people. It was magic.” She knit sweaters for everyone in the family but this cable-knit sweater was a Christmas gift for Elaine’s husband, made out of a beautiful soft yarn (perhaps with some alpaca?). Her mother-in-law had even included a small card of extra yarn, anticipating the need for some future repair. As we spoke on the phone, I could hear in Elaine’s voice the sentiment of the sweater and warmth towards her mother-in-law. Clothes can be daily reminders of people that matter to us.

After twenty years of constant use, a hole appeared in the front of the favorite sweater. Elaine went on a journey to figure out how to fix it.

The plot thickens (and so does the sweater)

Elaine first visited a local repair shop, where she was told they would just do a regular darn on it (which would break up the cable pattern). Elaine thought, hm, for something this special maybe we can do better.

Next Elaine turned to the internet, and found a place in Michigan that does invisible mends on sweaters, if she mailed it to them. She considered it, but feared the sweater might be lost in transit.

So then she started looking up different ways to repair knits and came across a book in the library that had a section on invisible mending or “Swiss darning” (sometimes also called duplicate stitch). As she had recently started to learn to knit, she thought: “I can do this!” YouTube videos Elaine added, were of especial use as, “it helps to actually see somebody doing it.”

[Side note if you’re wondering what-in-the-what is a Swiss darn: Basic darning is weaving thread together, to essentially create a new patch of fabric. In Swiss darning, you are recreating stitches. This can make it more complex than a woven darn, especially for a complex knit with cables but the outcome will better preserve the original knit pattern.]

Next the question was, what yarn to use? There was the card it came with, but it wasn’t enough. Elaine wasn’t sure what fibers the sweater was made of, and she could no longer ask her mother-in-law. On the hunt for a good match, she visited a “local thrift store for arts and creative supplies”, Seattle Recreative, a shop where people donate things such as leftover yarn or fabric remnants.

A few weeks before Christmas she found a ball of yarn that was a good color match, fixed up the sweater and wrapped it up as a Christmas gift.

It was the belt buckle all along

Her husband wore the newly repaired sweater constantly all winter. Elaine noted that two of his other sweaters had worn out in the same spot. What was going on?? She realized that it was his belt buckle, digging into the fibers of all of these sweaters. Elaine picked up a new belt as another gift.

What else is next in her mending pile?

Another sweater with some sentimental value in it: a rainbow stripe knit that, “started out belonging to my husband's younger brother, who outgrew it. He gave it to their father, and when their father passed, my husband took to wearing it (and I've borrowed it on occasion) It reminds us of the Lifesaver package with it's bold stripes.”

It’s been repaired a few times since it’s worn constantly. Elaine is also now knitting another, similar sweater, to give this one some rest.

Thank you so much for sharing Elaine! A nice story of a beautiful sweater. Funnily, I too, learned how to Swiss darn to repair an heirloom mend in my life.

Do you have a story to share of a recent mend? I’d love to hear about it! Please submit here. Next up we’ll hear from Roísín in Bristol and her favorite vintage jeans.

I’m looking to share narratives of repair/reuse and how we can love the things we own for longer.

Each narrative should have a few parts:

1. The backstory Why did the item need to be mended? Where did you get it in the first place?

2. The fix How did you fix or rework it? Did you do it yourself or take it somewhere to be repaired?

3. The after-effects How does it feel to use the thing post-repair?

Message me via Substack or fill out this link to submit for an interview. Looking forward to chatting, thank you!

Some days I’m excited by how much I have to learn about repair, other days I’m overwhelmed, but I’m always relieved to find someone who is more informed and good at sharing. Cynthia Power of Molte Volte is exactly that. Drawing on her time running Eileen Fisher’s resale program and working at the resale software company ReCurate, Power now writes a great newsletter and co-hosts the wonderful “Untangling Circularity” podcast. I’ve learned so much through both.

While this newsletter typically features the story of an individual mend or an expert repairer, I wanted to step back with Cynthia. We had a wide-ranging conversation on apparel repair and below are some of the highlights.

Repair & the trust barrier

I went into the conversation with the idea of asking Power about industry innovations that could make repair more easily scale. As I caught up on her podcast before our conversation, I realized that “how to scale” was the wrong question to ask.

In a recent episode of Untangling Circularity, the guest Gavin Fernie-Jones noted that they have been thinking about how circularity spreads rather than how it scales.

Scaling means a repeatable, centralized process. Spreading implies something kept local, with different groups learning from and building off each other.

Power is seeing a lot of great local mending shops such as The Fxry in Seattle or Old Flame Mending in Pittsburgh. Rather than waiting for an innovation to widgetize repair nationally, what might encourage new repair businesses to form in other communities? One possibility could be the newly launched Mender Guild (discussed in another Untangling Circularity episode!), which aims to connect repair businesses nation-wide and to share resources like discounted insurance.

We chatted instead about what makes mending so challenging for businesses and individuals despite the growing interest in it. Power sees the same barrier for both: trust.

People find it hard to trust their sewing skills, their creativity or unfamiliar repair shops. Even replacing a button can be intimidating. “It's not just a lack of knowledge, [people have] a fear that they aren't qualified to do anything,” Power notes.

For those who love visible mending, it’s hard to spin up the creative energy on demand. Powers finds: “I have to have enough energy to do it. If I've rested for a while, I get bored and then get excited about making something.”

Finally, taking an item to a repair shop is hard if you don’t know them to trust that they’ll say, replace the zipper on your favorite winter jacket without ruining it.

For businesses, there’s a similar hesitation as “it's hard to automate repair. Every piece is a little bit different,” Power notes. “When people think of profits and efficiency, they think about doing the same thing over and over and over again and repair isn't that.”

When Power was at Eileen Fisher, an employee in-house handled repairs of items in the take back program, knowing the garments could be sold for a good price with quick fixes to small rips or missing buttons. However, Power reflects, “a lot of companies don't have that internal talent anymore. So they look for a partner, but that also takes time, right? To figure out, what is your standard of repair as a brand?”

Personalization as the future of repair?

Despite the barriers to repair (and the very real cost calculus) Power sees open business potential, particularly in visible repair. “I think there's a huge opportunity in customization-like repair,” Power says, “a brand doing really creative, beautiful repairs offered as a customization. It’s repair, but also beyond that.”

I agree! I’ve seen more brands with in-house repair services, but haven’t seen one yet that adds a creative branded twist. Sure, I’m glad to be able to take my worn-out Vejas directly to the store to be fixed, but what if they came home cooler than when I first bought them?

Cynthia’s own “distraction repair” mends

Every Untangling Circularity episode starts with the guest sharing a favorite second-hand item, so of course I had to ask Power for a favorite prior mend.

She brought up this “creamy yellow shirt” with “long-term armpit stains, just from wearing it over and over and over again.” She wanted to keep wearing it so thought, “Well, I'm going to try to disguise those by going crazy with embroidery.” Over several hours of a train trip Power says she “embroidered over the shoulders, the sleeves, the front, with just all these colors going all over the place. So it's more like a distraction repair. I think it's funny.”

Never heard of the phrase “distraction repair” but I love it. It reminds me of WW1 dazzle camouflage or anti-facial recognition make-up.

Why you might love the “Untangling Circularity” podcast too

Power and her co-host Laura Novich are curious, persistent and quick to define industry jargon. They also have a round-table format that I love. Instead of one guest at a time, every episode is a dialogue with 2-3 folks sharing their related insights /stories in turn (and then often asking each other questions!). If you’re a consumer curious about how brands think about repair and circularity, these are interesting conversations to listen in on. The focus is mostly (but not entirely!) on fashion.

The podcast is currently running a mini-series on materials, meant for professionals trying to find/make more recycled or recyclable materials for garments. There will be case studies with brands and discussions on the quirks of supply chains for recycled materials.

Thank you for the conversation Cynthia!

For anyone reading – How does this conversation match your picture of the repair landscape? What barriers do you see for people or businesses to repair? What recent repair innovations have excited you most? How have you continued to learn about repair?

We’ve talked in the past about covering stains and holes with embroidery, dyeing, darning and more.

All of these methods are lovely and all of them take a bit of time. What’s an easier way to reinvigorate something spotted? Patches!

I’ve been thinking of them lately as stickers for my clothes and there are a lot of fun ones around.

Here is a parade of 6 patches I’m into:

We’ll be back next time with an interview with circularity expert Cynthia Power of Molte Volte.

Have you patched something recently or found a source of cool patch for sale? Let me know!

Where did the pants come from and how’d they get ripped?

I got these pants from the bottom of a “to be brought to goodwill” bin in my mom’s closet when I was home helping her clean out her closet. Before they ended up in the bin they were my twin brother’s pants for his discount tire work uniform. My brother and I don’t share many similarities, but I was surprised to find out that our waist measurement is exactly the same and they fit me perfectly.

When I first stole these from the bin, they had a rip in the knee that came from all the constant kneeling and standing he did at the tire shop. After I repaired this hole and made them my own, I also created a few holes on my own (by accident) in the ankle from them getting caught in my bike chain (I try to remember to roll up my right leg pants when I bike now).

How did you repair them?

All of the repairs on these pants use a method called darning, which is essentially weaving yarn or thread over the hole to create new fabric where there wasn’t any before. It’s one of my favorite methods to mend clothes (I have a tutorial about this method here). What is extra special to me about these pants is that the knee darn was done by me, and the little darns on the ankle were done by someone else at a mending circle that I was helping run at an earth day event last year.

How does it feel to wear them after repair?

It makes me so happy to wear these pants now. Not just because I kept something in use longer that was going to be discarded; but also because they now tell a better story of the my life and how it intertwines with others. They remind me of the hard work of my brother, of how much I love biking around this city, and of the kindness of strangers who show up to an event just to help mend other people’s clothes.

Thank you Danielle! Finally — How’d you get into running mending events?

I started running mending circles a little over a year ago when I found the organization Reclypt (which is now part of Fabscrap), that was hosting events in NYC centered around circle fashion. I approached their founder Rachel about running a recuring casual mending club where people could bring their own projects, and mending club was formed from there! This is a bit of an aside, but I think often when people have an idea or something they want to build, they think they have to start it from scratch. But I would encourage people to look around and ask themselves, how can I build upon the work the people in my community are already doing? And that’s often a great place to start. Especially in NYC, there are many climate orgs with overlapping work; it’s always fun to get to volunteer to incorporate mending into an event. Some fun one’s in the past have been with Uprose and Clean Bushwick Initiative.

Thank you so much Danielle! Next On the Mends will feature an investigation into shops that have their own onsite repair / tailor.

Do you have a mended garment with a story to tell? Please reach out and share it!

How does a vintage seller like Lexie clean, prep and merchandise clothing she acquires for resale? What might I learn from her expertise to apply to the clothes in my own closet?

Lexie describes the Somerville MA based Lexie Butterfly Vintage as all about “humorous, hippie, clown vintage for the rainbow soul.”

She’s been in the vintage business full-time since 2010, starting following a fire that burned down her childhood home. The fire took a cache of clothes Lexie’s mother had saved for her daughter from the ‘70s and ‘80s. Lexie had grown up playing dress-up in those clothes and learned from them first-hand what high quality feels like. After the fire, Lexie and her mother began a mission to reacquire as many of the lost clothes as possible.

Processing clothes for the shop

“Every single thing that ends up in the store goes through a processing period in my studio,” Lexie says. Processing clothes for the shop includes both laundry and repair. “I have learned through trial and error how to fix just about anything. Not that I can fix everything – some things are definitely a lost cause, but at the very least, my train station is the last stop.”

Love for the clothing she’s handling inspires Lexie, “I just can't help [but try for repair] when I see a really, really beautiful piece,” she says, “[especially when] it has a very clear course of action to make it better, bringing it back to life for its new home.”

Vintage clothes, Lexie notes, are hard to handle because they often lack care tags and also lack labels on the fiber making up the garment. She’s learned how to restore vintage clothes simply by handling a lot of them, creating a sort of flow-chart in her mind through the feel of the garment of likely fiber types and the best care methods based on what has worked previously with similar garments. Her 15+ years experience in the business has given her a lot of opportunities to learn. According to Lexie, “trial and error that basically translates to: there have been thousands of pieces that I've ruined over my career in order to be able to fix some now.”

Laundry

Lexie launders clothing carefully to lift body odor from an oft-worn garment, to clean out old discoloration or staining and to remove any toxins the vintage fibers might have been exposed to, like mold or asbestos,. Cotton whites are particularly satisfying to revive Lexie finds, as they “shape up really well.” Silks, she notes, are most frequently the lost causes, as exposure to water can irreversibly change the touch of the fabric.

Lexie developed a process she terms at-home dry cleaning, refining her process with her scientist husband. She sprays clothes with a mix of vodka, water and tea-tree oil before steaming them from the inside. The vodka is inspired by the frequent use of the spirit to freshen up clothes in theater costume shops. The tea-tree oil has natural antibacterial properties and does a great job of lifting a musty smell, without leaving a heavy scent. While Lexie doesn’t use scents like lavender, so that the clothes don’t smell strong for her clients, for your own clothes you might add a few drops of your favorite scent into the spray bottle.

Repair

Lexie doesn’t just clean clothes before selling them, she’ll also take on repairs big and small. The repairs are aided by the supplies she has in her studio.

Lexie recounted a particularly satisfying recent repair replacing a button – “I have a ridiculous collection of vintage buttons…the other day, I was processing a 1940s Navy issue officer skirt, and it was missing one very important button, with an embossed anchor on it. I happened to find a nearly identical button, centimeters off of being the exact same. I swear, I got misty eyed. I just thought, what are the odds? It's one singular button in this 15 pound bundle of buttons I randomly bought.”

She even applies her expertise in clothing restoration for local customers, either by directly working with the clothing themselves or providing a step-by-step list of instructions and recommended products.

Restoration tips for you or me

What does Lexie recommend for a non-professional?

1. Wash as little as possible and hand-wash if you can (“every time you wash clothes, it shortens the life just a little bit.”)

2. Skip the dry-cleaner, try out at-home dry cleaning instead (see the tips above!)

3. No Febreze ever (“Don't do it. It's a super harsh chemical and it won't ever stop smelling like Febreze.”)

4. Use biodegradable soaps (she loves Sol-u-mel)

5. Consider batching similar items (That way you only need to get out all the stuff to process only one garment, think: “Today is the day I'm washing all my cashmere sweaters. Or today's the day I'm doing my at-home dry cleaning.”)

Merchandising her store, merchandising my closet

Lexie Butterfly Vintage is known for hippy clown vintage, but while that stands out in the shop window it’s not all Lexie sells. She notes that the wacky brings people into the store, attracted by say a “neon yellow disco shirt with clocks all over it” even if they end up leaving with a beige top that better fits their lifestyle.

I reflected how I could take that same approach to the clothes I own – brightening up the black clothes I wear frequently with more bright and playful touches.

Try the same? Or if you find yourself in Somerville MA stop by Lexie Butterfly Vintage where “The whole purpose of my store is happiness,” Lexie says, “and the embodiment of childhood whimsy. I wanted it to be a space where it could be like a rainbow escape for people, you know, escape the mundane beige-ness of your everyday life, enter into my rainbow den for a short little period.

How have you ‘processed’ vintage clothes brought into your closet? Any lost causes you’ve long mourned or pieces you’ve been meaning to try to restore. I’d love to hear about it!

Next On the Mends will feature an interview with of the wonderful .

I started googling communal dye vats.

When you dye something, you have to prepare a dye vat and, particularly for natural dyes, prepare the fabric to be dyed beforehand. Once prepared the dye vat can be used to dye a number of garments, so there is real efficiency in pooling a dye job. I came across Green Matters Natural Dye Co and sent my hat in for an indigo dip.

Winona Quigley founded Green Matters, a natural dye focused dye-house based in a former dairy barn in her home area of Lancaster County PA, ten years ago. She had started experimenting with natural dyes while a student at Parsons School of Design. Initially, Green Matters dealt only in dye jobs for businesses – running fabric for sustainability-focused clothing companies through their industrial machines.

“For years we were B2B (business 2 business), and we would get emails, ‘I have one jacket, can you dye it?’ But it's hard to set up a machine to dye a single jacket,” Quigley says. “With the more requests we got like that, it was clear to me that, wait a minute, these people are trying to keep their garments out of the landfill, they’re trying to keep things in their wardrobe longer.”

So Green Matters figured out how to start serving individuals. The business introduced communal dye vat, initially with only indigo, but now Green Matters offers three different rotating colors each month. The colors for January + February are ‘Slate Blue’, ‘Crocus’ and ‘Rum Raisin.’

In choosing each month’s colors, Quigley noted communal dye vat colors performed best when they were in reference to the colors dominating the runway or recent forecasting reports. She observed, “That was kind of exciting. It's like [customers are] participating in a trend minus the waste.” Though she also noted a tension, as she aims to contribute to a slower fashion, divorced from constant changes.

It’s been an interesting experience she notes, selecting the colors. When working B2B, the businesses are selecting the shades, but with customers, there is a creativity, a storytelling component to curating the shades.

How do the dye vats work for an individual? It’s easy. I went to the Green Matters web site, selected the color and whether I wanted the item dyed solid or tie dyed. After checking out, the team at Green Matters sent me a shipping label to mail in the hat. (Tip for New Yorkers! You can save on shipping by instead dropping off at IVX Coffee in Boerum Hill.) Green Matters collects everything for that month’s dye baths, dyes it all and then runs quality checks before sending it back.

I’m not alone in sending in stained fabric it seems. “The one element that we encountered [in introducing the community dye baths] was that sometimes people were dyeing things because they were stained, and sometimes the stain was totally covered by the dye and sometimes it wasn't,” Quigley explained. “So we had to build in a part of our process that we call reprocessing, which means that when you're ordering, you're acknowledging that if a stain does not get covered up, we'll do a pattern technique over the original color to obscure it.”

What kind of things are good candidates for natural dye? “Anything that is a natural fiber is a great candidate for natural dye,” Quigley says. Think: your faded cotton duvet cover, or the wool sweater that was never your shade. Quigley notes that a lot of people think that the dyed textile needs to be white, or solid colored, but while the original color or pattern will impact the outcome, patterned or colored fabric can also look really beautiful overdyed.

“One of the first things I dyed [with the individual dye baths] was my great-grandmother's plaid flannel,” Quigley says. “That was something that I had in my closet but I never wore. After dyeing it blue, it was like, oh, this is a part of my life now. It's branded to me, but it still has a story that is much older than me, much richer than just something I bought recently.”

I too have found it refreshing to overdye clothes I rarely use. Quigley also noted that dyeing can also be a fun way to explore colors that you don’t usually wear, with garments and shapes that feel comfortable.

She described breaking out of her normal jumpsuit wardrobe for a friend’s wedding this past summer in Italy, wearing clothes dyed blood orange and slate blue in Green Matters’ dye baths. “I don't normally wear bright orange dresses, but romping around the Mediterranean is a different lifestyle,” Quigley said. “It was fun to make a capsule wardrobe for a trip that was very different from what I normally wear, but was also still me, with things I knew fit me well. I felt good in it.”

Does Quigley have any other tips to offer on how to love one’s own clothing longer? Pay attention to care labels, air dry and keep ‘em folded. She reaffirms, “reading care labels is really important because different fibers require different care…the dryer cycle contributes to the wearing down of the garment and…folding helps as it's easier for holes to develop if a balled up fiber is continually creased in the same place.”

Easier said than done of course, Quigley notes that she’s not always consistent about following this advice herself. She advises anyone looking to make a more sustainable wardrobe to give themselves time and grace, “When I started my slow fashion journey, I felt a little bit overwhelmed…but it’s ‘slow’ fashion for a reason. We're so used to the instant gratification of fast fashion. It's okay if you learn how to put a patch on your jeans and it takes you several weeks to do it. It's okay to change one thing at a time.”

Thank you so much for sharing your expertise Winona! I’m hoping to do a lot more overdyeing of my clothes and bedding in 2025. Is there anything in your wardrobe you’re itching to dye? I’d love to hear about it.

In the next On the Mends we’ll be talking to Lexie, the owner of Lexie Butterfly Vintage on her tips and learned tricks in styling and cleaning vintage clothes to prepare them for sale.

I found out about Cobbler Bushwick Co earlier in the year when a friend sent me a link to one of the company’s classes  – you can take a 2 day workshop and learn how to upcycle sneakers. (Here’s a link for a class scheduled for January!) 

I wasn’t able to make the dates of the specific class but I was intrigued. I had been wanting to learn more about shoe repair and maintenance but I had understood sneakers to be unrepairable. How could they be upcycled exactly?

I thought sneakers couldn’t be repaired because they tended to be made up of so many disparate materials, glued together. My understanding of sneaker care was that while you could extend the life of a pair by replacing the laces or cleaning off some spots (shout out to the Jason Markk sneaker cleaning supplies by the way, if you have dirty sneaks), you couldn’t replace the soles of sneakers the same way you could a pair of leather boots. 

Turns out, I was wrong! Sneakers can be transformed and then continued to be reworn! Cobbler Bushwick Co remade a pair of Adidas Stan Smiths I had with a hole in the sole and now I’ve been loving wearing them again all over town. They are so comfortable (which, considering I’m now about 9 months pregnant, calling any shoes comfortable is really saying something!) and have a spongy new sole, but with an upper that was already perfectly molded to my feet. 

The upcycled are a fun little outfit surprise, a detail that I’ve enjoyed adding some pizzazz to whatever clothing is fitting me at the moment, to work, to a party at the Whitney museum, to the playground, to crunch over some leaves on a long autumn walk. Just about anywhere. 

What was the process in upcycling? Well,  I perused the site, found a pair I liked, checked out, and then a few days later I brought my old shoes over to Greenpoint. I actually brought in two pairs of Stan Smiths, one older, with the holes in the soles and one with less wear. I had gotten the second pair after the first started letting in water if I wore them in the rain, but I somehow still couldn’t get rid of the older pair. I was keeping them in case I needed to go walking through the mud, or something. Roh recommended upcycling the more worn ones, “I like challenges,” she said. She has people come in with shoes for upcycling in far worse condition than my own, “as long as the material is good,” they can be good candidates for upcycling. 

I had selected a particular model of upcycled shoe on the Cobbler Bushwick Co website, but in person Roh showed me all the new sole options on offer. And I ended up switching to a cushy Vibram sole instead of the leather one I had originally selected. 

Roh’s background is in footwear design and she started her career working for traditional shoe manufacturers. She wanted to do something better in terms of material use and started a brand selling shoes and bags with interchangeable or replaceable parts. The idea being that as a customer you could swap in new parts to keep the shoes or bags fresh and thus be more sustainable, rather than tossing the whole thing once they felt worn or no longer your style. 

Roh trained up her brother in South Korea in how to make shoes, and he opened a small workshop for her business. The interchangeable shoe business has since closed (the costs of marketing a new brand from scratch were too high!), but after her training Roh’s sneaker-head brother started applying his new cobbler skills to his love of sneakers. He found success in Korea and then Roh took the idea back to Brooklyn to found Cobbler Bushwick Co. 

Cobbler Bushwick Co now sells upcycled shoes made from used shoes Roh acquires, you can send in your own pair for upcycling as I did or you can take a class to learn how to upcycle your own shoes. The one thing the business doesn’t do is work with new shoes. 

What makes old shoes good candidates for upcycling? Roh says it’s less about the condition of the shoes but rather the original material. Leather shoes like Stan Smiths work well, as do cotton or canvas shoes. Any natural materials work pretty well. Nike flyknits, not so much. The challenge being that the flyknit is a material mix, which makes deconstructing the shoe into its component pieces harder. 

Roh’s main recommendation in keeping shoes in a rotation for longer is to “buy nice shoes”. Nice shoes to start. How do you know which ones are nice? “Buy leather shoes, if you could. Keep using the money for repair,” instead of buying cheap and shelling out more to replace when they start falling apart. 

Where does she recommend taking shoes for repair in NYC? The Veja shop, specifically the Williamsburg location, that has an in-house cobbler station that will repair shoes from all brands. 

Since the election I’ve been pondering the phrase “mending mindset” I heard Repair Shop’s Rachel Meade Smith use at a talk on mending. She used it in context of a broader comment on how mending will not change or fix the world – which to be clear, I agree with. Mending is small and personal and in the year 2024 is done mostly by those with the luxury of time. But she also talked about how the practice can give a person a broader “mending mindset” or lens through which one sees in the imperfect world around them opportunities for repair rather than opportunities for replacement. With a newly elected president dedicated to tearing systems down, I have been pondering how best to apply the mending mindset to the community around me. Welcome any ideas on this front.

Also please message if you have a mend or mending conundrum to share! Love sharing the stories behind specific mends from those with experienced and those new to repair.

Until this past summer, when I realized two obvious things: 1) a big part of why I started this newsletter was to connect with other people on mending and 2) that these connections didn’t need to happen digitally!! Here I am living in a city of 8M people!!! There had to be some mending meet-ups going on. I started Googling. 

Since then I’ve attended five different community-based repair events (and one mending related talk!) and this is the main thing I’ve learned.

Mending in community is more fun than mending alone. 

No matter which event, it was nice to be doing something with my hands while talking to someone new. Or not talking at all, just working in parallel. 

At each meet-up everyone brought a project (or multiple projects) from their mending pile. There were generally mending supplies on hand to buy or borrow and an air of informal knowledge-share. Folks arriving with projects that stumped them and finding others with tips on hand.

There are indeed lots of mending events happening around NYC. Here are a few I attended the past few months: 

1. Recylpt’s mending circle (once at IVX coffee and once at Fabscrap!) These were my favorite of the bunch. Good size – small enough to easily talk to others, big enough to have a good mix of people to talk to – friendly folks, and an interesting mix of projects people had underway. 

   Fabscrap is a very cool textile recycling facility based in the beautiful Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park. While it’s not the most conveniently located space for me personally, it was fun to browse while there for the mending event. I picked up some yarn cards, likely samples from a sweater manufacturer, that have already proven really great for darning. 

   Recylpt, a circular fashion community group in NYC, has since actually merged into Fabscrap, so their events are on pause for the fall, but I hope they return in the New Year!

2. Knitty City’s mending circle. Knitty City is a well-stocked yarn shop in the Upper West Side. Their weekly mending circle takes place at a table in the middle of the shop, and was a small group but very warm. I found it impossible to leave without picking up a new skein of yarn, so now I’ve got a baby cardigan with something prettily hand-dyed.

3. Textile Arts Center’s monthly ‘Darn It!’ mending club. So many people were there for the mending club that the group spilled out into tables in two different rooms. Held typically the first Sunday of every month, the group seemed like a nice mix of regulars and those new to mending. The organizers/facilitators (the day I was there it was Hekima Hapa of Black Girl Sew and Martina Cox) had brought a lot of materials and the Textile Arts Center is such a well-stocked space.  Everyone was friendly but I missed the camaraderie a smaller group provides.

4. Bushwick’s Repair Fest. Organized by the Clean Bushwick Initiative, the event featured expert repairers of many different stripes – electronics, carpentry, jewelry, lighting and indeed, clothing. They were prepared to help folks fix things, with an emphasis on teaching the technique as they did it.

   I went with my father and came away with several repaired pieces of jewelry, some new darning technique ideas and most excitingly of all, a father who had tried darning himself for the first time! He was very excited about the concept and proudly showed me the darned heel of the sock in action on his foot the next day.

Places I follow that seem to host regular mending meet-ups and classes outside of NYC: 

1. Old Flame Mending (Pittsburgh)

2. Suay (Los Angeles)

3. Top Stitch Mending (Richmond)

4. Little Cliff Mending (St Louis)

Any in-person mending or crafting events that you have enjoyed? I’m selfishly especially interested in New York events, but curious about any communal experiences. YouTube is incredible but it’s just easier and nicer to learn from an in-person demonstration, and fun to then chat to the person after. 

Thanks for coming on this meet-up digression with me. Next time we’ll (actually) be back with the interview about shoe maintenance and sneaker upcycling with cobbler bushwick co!

Where did you get them from?

“I found them while thrifting in Margaretville with Angie. She spotted them and said, "These are for you," and I immediately agreed—into the bag they went! We kept sifting through more treasures, totally in our thrifting groove. But when we got home and started sorting through our finds, we realized… there was a HUGE hole on the butt! Like, hilariously huge. But I loved the bright colors and how soft the fabric was, so I felt compelled to try fixing them. Angie and I both agreed it was worth the effort.”

How’d they get ripped?

“Honestly, no clue. It's a total mystery! It doesn’t look like a rip at all—it’s like someone just decided to cut a whole chunk out for fun.”

How’d you end up repairing them?

“Well, there were a few puzzle pieces to figure out. Like I mentioned, it didn’t look like a normal rip, so I couldn’t just stitch it back together. The fabric is also super soft and stretchy, and the hole is on the butt—prime real estate for something fun! You actually suggested the patch idea, which was brilliant, and I thought, “What do I want on my butt? A juicy pink heart, of course!” The tricky part was finding fabric that was both soft and stretchy, so it’d look good and hold up when you're walking, sitting, or stretching out in bed. I dug through my stash and found an old pink t-shirt of my dad's from the 80s, made from the perfect material.

To make the patch, I laid the pants out, slipped a piece of paper inside to trace the shape of the hole, then drew a heart around it. I used that as a stencil to cut the patch from the pink fabric, pinned it onto the pants, and stitched it up with matching pink thread using a whip stitch.”

How do they feel to rock after you’ve fixed them?

“They feel amazing! Honestly, this project was inspired by watching Rita’s [Simone’s niece!/my toddler daughter’s] bedtime routine. She’s so into her pajamas, and it made me realize how fun that part of the day could be, rather than just throwing on whatever before crashing into bed. Now, these pajamas are super comfortable, fun to walk around in, and they actually make me excited to get into bed. It’s giving both big kid and big adult energy, and I’m here for it.”

Thank you so much Simone! Loved watching these PJs evolve. We will be back next with an interview with cobbler expert and upcycle sneaker extraordinaire, Sung of cobbler bushwick.

It seems like there’s a lot going on in coming weeks mending events wise, so I thought I’d list out some of what’s going on. I’ll be at a few of these! Let me know if you’re around. Let me know if there’s more I should add?

Online Events

• Mending Series at Tatter

  • Mending on Knit (October 9th)

  • Mending Denim with Sashiko (October 16th)

  • Mending Socks (October 23rd)

  • Mending Narrative (November 6th)

  • Mending on Jersey (November 13th) — feat. previous On the Mends expert interviewee Sam Bennett!

New York

• 3 Talks with Artists on Mending at Index (First one October 15th)

• Clothing Repair Lab at Brooklyn Public Library in Borough Park (October 17th)

• Bushwick Repair Fest (October 19th)

• Visible Mending Workshop at The Craft Studio Salon (November 10th)

• Darn It Mending Club at Textile Arts Center (First Sunday of every month)

• Mending Circle at Knitty City (Every Friday)

The most common repairs, Todd says are, crotch blowouts from biking or iphone/wallet holes on the back pocket. Those are the most common but our wear patterns are all unique and so fabric will fade in different places on different pants for different people. 

“The cliche thing to say,” Todd notes, “is every pair of jeans starts off the same, and they all end up completely unique.”

I spoke to Todd on a crisp Friday afternoon, with the oncoming feeling of autumn in the air. Inspired by the weather and our conversation I walked away with a new jean jacket in addition to my interview notes. 

Todd got started making jeans as he puts it, “the last time skinny jeans were out of vogue.” He was on the hunt for pants that “weren’t enormous” and got connected with a friend of a friend who let him work as an assistant, learning to sew.  

“I had a sewing machine in my bedroom and then became obsessed with pattern making and then became obsessed with machinery beyond just a single needle sewing machine,” Todd says of his early days with sewing. “It just kinda snowballed until I realized, well, I need a thread collection… I need, like, tables and space and fabric and what like, what's what's actually good fabric anyway? It’s endless.” 

Todd said it took him a while to get good at making jeans but once he was, that it didn’t make sense to do it just for himself. He started making them for friends and then selling them too. He learned more about denim repair specifically from a stint as a tailor at Levi’s. 

Todd is still constantly learning, tinkering with patterns, the distribution of numbers, the expected shrinkage of the fabric, the fabric. Each time I’ve been into the shop, he’s been full of ideas on how he could continue to change and improve the patterns. Todd also makes custom, made-to-order, pants and jackets. 

Another cool old machine. This one specializing in button-holes.

Todd is particular about how he makes his jeans but he doesn’t recommend a particularly arduous care routine, “wash them in cold water inside out and then hang dry,” he says, “that's my generic washing instructions.” Adding, “putting them in the freezer is nonsense. Not washing them is a terrible idea.” Ultimately, wearing the jeans you love is recommended and wearing them will wear them out. The more you use them, the more the fabric will wear,” Todd says.

Thanks so much Todd for sharing your expertise! In my personal life expertise it is so hard to find jeans that fit just right that once I do I hate giving them up! This is why jeans were a key part of my gateway into the world of repair. I found it thrilling to take jeans I feared were past wearing and find that someone could fix them for me such that they had years more wears in store. 

Below Connie shares a bit about how she came to woodworking and tips for caring for wood cutting boards.

“After retiring in 2015 and deciding to spend our winters in Florida, I joined a very large fully equipped, all volunteer woodworking club in central Florida. It was a good time to find a new hobby and woodworking was not something I could easily try out in my Brooklyn apartment. 

After taking a few classes, I was hooked. I found community, mentors and a new best friend. 

Judi is a graphic artist, miniature specialist and former wallpaper designer.  She made the cutting board below and gifted it to my daughter.  We found that a lot of people built something from a plan and had no idea what to do with the remaining wood, so we started collecting wood scraps from the trash bins and then people just started to give us their scrap wood.  The entire board in the photo is made from scraps.  Judi had some long skinny pieces that she glued up and then crosscut to form the pattern and sandwiched between two larger pieces. We view wood inconsistencies as character while some others see it as an ugly blemish.

Designs for wood boards are influenced by nature, quilting, weaving, geometrics and usage requirements. In general a good kitchen board should be at least an 1/2 thick. If you butcher cut meat with a cleaver or pound a lot of cutlets, you would want at least a 1 1/2 inch to 2 inch board to take the pounding. 

Judi and I have found that we are more creative when we work with scrap wood. This has led us to hosting several drop in classes, where we haul in our various completed scrap wood projects to show others what can be made with some patience and imagination. 

The woodshop has several hundred members with many former professionals.  Their guidance and input has helped me to become a better woodworker, building and caring for the items I have made.” 

Wood Cutting Board Refresh

Over time, wood cutting boards tend to dry and show a lot of their usage.  You can refresh your board to make it last longer and look better. 

Most wood boards are either a solid piece of wood or wood pieces joined/glued together.  The grain/fibers of the wood will run in one general direction. 

Step 1.  Wash your board thoroughly and use a steel wool scrubber or a heavy duty scrubbing pad to clean the surface.  When clean, use a scrubber or a pad and run it with some force in the same direction as the grain.  This will help erase some of the shallow knife cuts. 

Optional step. If you want to work on the board some more to eliminate or minimize deeper knife cuts, then you must step up to using sand paper

• Start with a coarse grit at 60 or 90

• Wrapping the paper around a block of wood or something solid makes it easier to work

• Sand with the wood grain in the same direction and do not sand in circles

• Sand at an even pace until you are satisfied with the whole board

• Wipe clean with a damp cloth before moving to a higher number grit 

• Sand again with a higher grit of 120/150. Each higher grit will make the board smoother, but will never eliminate a deep cut mark a lower grit left behind.  Most purchased boards are sanded to 180 - 220 grit

Step 2.  Apply food grade mineral oil to the clean board with a rag on both sides and leave it for several hours or overnight.  Be sure to also oil the edges!  I usually place the board on top of a piece of wax or parchment paper to make the clean up easier. If after an hour or two, the board absorbs all of the oil and looks dry, apply more mineral oil. After several hours, wipe away any remaining oil with a cloth.  Old cotton T-shirts work the best! 

Optional / Alternate step.  You can also use a Wood Board cream/oil instead of or in addition to the mineral oil depending on the condition of your board.  Many Board Creams also include beeswax for additional protection.  I prefer Boos Block Board Cream. Boos is well known for making cutting boards for butchers and thick end grain cutting boards. They also sell a Boos Board Mystery oil, which I have used and it works exactly like mineral oil. 

General Wood Board Advice:

• hand wash only - never use a dishwasher 

• avoid soaking in the sink

• after use, clean with warm water (hot with meat), dish soap and sponge

• after washing, dry with towel or place on a rack to air dry 

A wooden board involves a bit more care, but your knives will stay sharper longer. A glass cutting board will dull your knives the fastest. 

Enjoy your refreshed board!

Thanks Connie! 

I’m excited to share the below interview with Sam of Repair Shop. I learned a lot from it. This is part of a new “expert” series for On the Mends, featuring the expertise and perspective of folks skilled in repair. 

How did you come to start Repair Shop? How did you come to the practice of repair more generally?

I was a textile designer for 8 years and I was really disillusioned by designing for a landfill. I went back to school and got my masters in interior design and felt like it was a similar practice, where we rip everything out and put something new in. I realized I really liked doing material research, so I worked for the Healthy Materials Lab for a number of years on healthier materials, which are typically more sustainable as well. Rachel and I met several years ago and just had a lot of overlapping interests, she got her masters at Parsons as well. We both were interested in objects in the home and she started darning…so we sat together at her apartment one night and had wine and darned together and we really liked it!

How did that evolve into teaching darning?

I was teaching at Parsons School of Design and at Pratt and Rachel is also a learning designer, and we had also been getting commissions to do repair work, but it’s hard to be paid in an equitable way, and to be paid for what it’s worth timewise. It’s incredibly expensive and so inaccessible to many and so we thought, why don’t we teach people?

It was during the pandemic and we had a workshop in the park. We were nervous about it but also really excited. For the first year at least, we did a workshop every month and they just filled up. 

We really feel very strongly that repair should be integrated into curriculum, whether that is an accessible workshop for people that’s taught in college or in K-12. I would really like to see that more as someone that teaches in design. There’s just a lot of innovative thinking that can come through understanding how to repair something.

You’ve taught in so many different kinds of settings – what skills or situations have felt especially satisfying to teach? 

Rachel and I are incredibly satisfied when we hear that someone we’ve taught has taught a new person the skill they’ve learned. That’s a call to action we do at the end of our workshops: we always ask for you to teach someone else.

In the past darning and mending in general was really part of need and necessity and was passed through family and friends. It was a social activity. With the rise of fast fashion, for textiles in particular, it’s really hard to compete with that. There’s no need to repair something. You can buy something new. But there’s a huge cost to that that people aren’t considering when you think about the embodied energy, the landfill, the pollution and we talk about that in our workshops as well. 

I love the call to teach someone else the call that you just taught them, especially as it sounds like you yourself learned from Rachel. How did you learn your repair skills?

I have a background as an artist and a maker and one thing that we really love about repair is that there is this moment of really examining the thing you’re about to repair and that can take time. For instance, I have this percolator that was my grandma’s and we always had apple cider with cinnamon at Christmastime. When she passed away a few years ago I said that’s the one thing I want. When I got it back to my apartment it was shorting out and never turning off. The water would be boiling and just burning off all of the apple cider essentially. I just fixed it after 4 years. It took that long to figure out. Materials like metal and wiring are not my natural forte, but what I ended up doing was finding another very similar Kenmore percolator. I bought it on eBay and I took it apart to see what the difference was. And there was a little ceramic tip that had broken off that was an insulator. It was a lot of my own analysis, YouTube. 

I have taken workshops definitely for making, but not repair. But because I’ve made so many things I have that sensibility of understanding materials and what is going to break if I do something and what is not. 

For someone who is less familiar with textiles and fiber arts in general, what would you recommend for someone looking to start darning for the first time?

There is a really nice book, Darning, Repair Make Mend, by Hikaru Noguchi, with really good visuals. Rachel had gotten it and then I had copied and gotten it myself and brought it over to her apartment, So when we first darning, I was following that book. There is really wonderful inspiration on Instagram at #darning. There is a great woman named Milli and the Bee, she’s German and she has amazing tutorials. Tutorials that I’m never going to do…it’s not my style, but for people who want to do more invisible repairs they’re really great. Rachel and I really like to do visible repairs specifically, so we can talk about it and inspire people to keep their things. 

Can you tell me a little bit more about what it means to you to repair something visibly? 

As a maker and an artist, the hardest part of not making something new is having that desire to put your finger on something, to still make it your own. And with visible repair, you have the option of honoring the existing but you can make it your own. Maybe you’re going to pick a special yarn or you’re going to embroider a saying on something – that’s really exciting to me. I feel like I’m having this artistic touch on it, but I’m still repairing something. I’ve done things that are invisible as well, because people have asked me to but I cannot stand doing it. (laughs) I’ve basically said, from now on, no. 

I wanted to ask you about doing commissions in general, you’ve mentioned the economic cost vs. the willingness to pay. I’ve only ever repaired something for myself or for a close friend. How does it feel different to repair something for yourself vs. someone else on commission.

I rarely get to repair something for myself but when it’s for me, it’s such a gift, because I get to do it exactly how I want to. When it’s for someone else, I definitely want to know the story behind the thing and if they have any preferences. Both Rachel and I say, it might not happen. At this point I can’t really do something I don’t like. While the amount of money people pay us for a commission is expensive, in the end I am getting paid between $3 and $10 a hole, or $3 or $10 an hour and you get $6 a hole. It depends. I keep track of it because I really want people to understand that it takes time. So when people come to me with a similar issue that I’ve fixed before, I can show them something I’ve fixed and I literally have a note card that says this took 25 hours, this is how much I charged and my hourly and per hole rate and then they understand a little bit more. I’m doing it by hand! It takes a really long time. Just because I’ve been doing it for a while, every garment is different. Finding the right kind of yarn and getting the drape right.

Repairing stuff is a privilege. It takes time. It costs money to get something repaired. You’re going to pay more to get something repaired than to get something new.

Repair is a dying craft and I want people to understand the value. It’s critical that we continue to repair things. We’re going to run out of space. It’s connected to global warming and there’s a big sustainability component that’s not as fun to talk about as looking at something that is beautiful. 

I would love to hear about another object you’ve repaired that has felt especially meaningful or rewarding. Does anything come to mind?

I’ve just finished another thing that was my grandma’s, a baby dress of her’s. It had some holes in it. It was funny to imagine her so small. I darned the holes and  I took words from her letters – she and I were penpals growing up and I had a lot of postcards from her. I have these five days of postcards from a trip to Branson, Missouri and they are just so mundane in a great way, “I went to the Olive Garden today…I went to the flea market and got these salt shakers for 5 cents.” (laughs) I can’t remember the exact phrases, but I took her handwriting and embroidered onto the dress. No one is going to use it again, but it was really nice to spend so much time with something that was hers when she was little and put her life, or one week in her life, onto this dress. 

Then I have this pair of Levi’s that a friend gave me when I was in grad school and they just got shredded. I just love them. They were darned and took over 70 hours and I still have to repair them more. They were darned with wool yarn so now these summer jeans are now like half warm/half summery. 

I imagine these are both different as one you’re using more in your day to day life than the other. How did repairing them change your relationship to each of the objects?

They feel a lot more special. Because I have my labor in them now. With the jeans in particular, every wear means the fibers are going to weaken, that there is going to be a new wear spot or hole. I just know there is work waiting for me every time I wear them. I want to take good care of them. 

For my grandma’s dress, it’s really exciting to have an idea in your head and be able to experiment and execute it. I’m not sure what is going to happen with the dress eventually. I would like it to be archival framed. I really love garments as pieces of art in general. I would be excited to see if that could happen in the future. There’s a really great framing place in Brooklyn, Atlantic Framing. It’s expensive but worth it. They do such a good job. 

Thank you so much again to Sam for the time! I immediately ordered a (used) copy of Hikaru Noguchi’s book after we spoke and I’m feeling inspired to tackle my own stock of inherited holey woolens. 

We’ll be back next week with more stories of mends and mending.

Happy September and welcome back to On the Mends! It feels back to school-ish in a nice way to return after our summer hiatus. There are a number of posts in the pipeline I’m really excited to share with you all. There will be more stories of mends, like in the first season of On the Mends, but mixed in will also be posts of interviews with experts about how to care for particular types of garments/objects and features on different mending related topics. 

We’re starting off with this sweater because fisherman sweaters feel nicely autumnal and learning something new feels autumnal too. What is Swiss darning, you may wonder? It’s a particular type of darning that can be applied to a knit garment. In contrast to normal darning where one is essentially creating a new patch of fabric to cover a hole, Swiss darning involves recreating a new patch of fabric that follows the pattern of the original knit, thereby allowing for a repair that lies flatter than a patch and can be even more invisible. 

This is the particular video I learned the Swiss darning from: ​​

I’m not someone accustomed to learning from YouTube – for whatever reason I’m inclined to try reading first — but I’m about 10 years late to be amazed by how well this video worked for quick learning. I also just learned to french braid my daughter’s hair with a similarly effective 20-minute how-to video.

I photographed this beautiful moth holey sweater about six months ago when I was first starting “On the Mends” but was too intimidated to actually fix it. I didn’t think I’d do a mend worthy enough for it. I even did a video mending consultation (with Old Flame Mending, more on this I hope in a later post!) to talk through my approach.

What is the thing?

A fisherman sweater that my great-grandmother knit for my mother Jane when she was in high school. My great-grandmother was a very serious knitter. My mom has pointed out the complexity of the sweater – each cable is a different type of cable (!) That requires a lot of careful tracking of each row to keep the full pattern straight.

At some point, likely years before I ever came across it, moths ate part of the sweater. 

How did I fix it? 

One thing I love about the sweater is that sometime in the past 60 years it was already mended, someone sewed on a patch of canvas, my mom doesn’t remember who or when. 

I decided to Swiss darn because I had been wanting to and it seemed this sweater was worth it. In the end I am pleased even though my Swiss darning job is a very newbie level and I realized once I started how much harder it is to do with cables in the mix too. I mostly winged it and despite the clear imperfections I feel so pleased.

What does it feel like to wear 

Well I can’t say I know for sure because candidly I’m about six months pregnant and the sweater doesn’t fit. BUT I am very proud and invigorated when I look at it. What else might be easier than I’d expect to learn, if only I sit through a 20 minute YouTube video first?! 

That’s it my friends! What thrilling learnings have you gained from YouTube how-to videos? I’m thinking I want to learn next how to make origami boxes or maybe how to do those braids that look like crowns…? Who knows! We’ll be back next week with a real darning expert sharing some deep thoughts on repairs’ place in our culture.