One of my lifelong skills, instilled within me by my mother, who lived in the Soviet Union for a vast portion of her life, has been mending. I have never been great at it, but I knew how to do a couple different stitches and how to sew on a button.
In the past couple of years I learned about visible mending and a new passion began. First it was jeans with hole-y knees, then jeans with stains, then jeans with holes along seams. So many jeans that needed mending! And of course so many kids’ clothes. Ripped knees and shirts, holes in winter pants, wripped jacket hems, and so on.
I learned about sashiko (and got some thread, needles, and a ring thimble while on a trip to Japan), I learned about embroidery, I learned about darning! And I’m still learning!
One of my favorite parts about visible mending is that it is ok if I don’t do it perfectly. When you’re trying to mend something invisibly, not doing it well means that it becomes visible and awkward and clumsy as a result. But when you’re mending out loud, as it were, you can make a picture!
What started with mending broken clothes then started to include modding clothes. I think the term is alteration, but that tends to mean things like hemming and tailoring, and I mean it in a more transformative way (I haven’t done a ton of research on this so I’m likely not the first to use this term; more research will follow!). I mean it in the sense that I’ve started modifying my clothes in such a way as to alter the style of them, not just the fit.
My latest projects have been fixing two sweatshirts and dyeing another, as well as an impromptu modification to the too-tight sleeves of my tumblr T-Shirt.
The sweatshirt dyeing process is not yet complete and has been a back and forth. I’ve had to remove color twice and bleach once before dyeing again for the millionth time. I should have expected that the more I learn about a thing, the more I will realize that I will need to still learn. I did not expect to be learning about the chemistry of textiles and textile production just to fix my silly little sweatshirts! But honestly, I love that. I love that there’s always more interesting stuff to learn!
The oxygen bleach (not chlorine bleach, which would lead to significantly more damage. Luckily, I learned this through careful research beforehand, rather than my usual approach of learning from my mistakes) I finally used to get rid of the yellowing also caused some minor damage to the metal components of one sweatshirt and completely broke the metal zipper of the other (to be fair, the package did say not to use on metal). As a result, I will not be bleaching again. My millionth trip to Michael’s resulted in me picking up some Royal Blue RIT dye but the result was ultimately too dark. I still have some of the Aquamarine and while I’m frankly exhausted with this sweatshirt, I will try one last dye job. If it doesn’t work out quite the way I wanted it to, I will simply leave it. Or dye it black. But more realistically I will just leave it.
Over the weekend I finally went to a nearby vintage clothing market and bought a bunch of cool stuff, including a leather jacket like the one I donated a few years back (and have been regretting ever since really, though I’ve managed to somewhat forgive my past self. She was operating under her best circumstances at the time), a bunch of neat sweaters, and a few t shirts. I’m especially excited about the USPS shirt, because who on earth even wears these??? I do need to modify it though because it’s a men’s XL and I don’t like how that would sit on me.
Overall, this selection needs to mosly be mended and washed. I’ve already managed to remove some funky stains off of one lovely sweater (yay!) and have washed the rest of the stuff, but I still need to find a professional cleaner for my leather jacket. I’m hoping that they will be able to do something about the lining as well because it is rather RANK.
Realistically I will not finish all the required mending before the heat sets in and I will be left with a growing pile of clothing modding and mending to-dos until the seasonally appropriate weather sets in and I remember that this stuff exists. I have already worn one of the new-to-me sweaters though so I need not be disappointed that I didn’t get to all of it before I actually get there. I’m going to ride this fashion modding and mending wave as long as feels right before I move on to the next thing.
PS: Update as of Aprill 22 when I’m actually posting this, vs. like, last week when I wrote it. I have done that one last dye job and my sweatshirt now looks like this:
It’s not quite the correct shade of blue, but I like it more than the original gray, so I’m done with it for now!