Embroidermending: Visible Mending With Joy
September 9, 2020
My two primary needlework loves, embroidery and knitting, are always vying for attention. In the past few years I’ve spent my winters mostly knitting and my summers mostly embroidering. But even in the midst of winter knitting, I still embroider, sometimes on a piece of knitwear and sometimes to creatively mend clothing. I like having a small embroidery project like this that provides a change for my mind & for my hands.
Embroidermending springs from a wish to save clothes from the garbage bin, save my budget from additional clothing expenditures, and express myself in my clothing style. I’ve been so happy to see the growing trend towards visible mending!
Mending has a long history. Much of it has been aimed at fixing a ripped or worn fabric so that the mend is NOT visible. Girls practiced darning stitches that would make the fabric look as it did before it was torn. Here are two photos of my mother’s practice work in a needlework project book she made as part of her teacher education in Quebec in 1946. The first sample shows a variety of darning stitches which would be invisible when done in the same colour as the background fabric, and the second sample shows a start at a weaving mend (you can see the bottom right corner of the patch has 3 threads carefully woven into the background fabric, this would be done all the way around the patch to weave it into the background invisibly).
In contrast to these invisible mending techniques, Japanese boro patchwork with sashiko stitching is the most visible type of mending I can think of, and this historical method has inspired the current visible mending trend. Boro textiles were formed by using scrap fabrics to patch other items, using sashiko darning stitch patterns to hold the layers together (historically mostly white running stitch on indigo fabrics). I first learned about sashiko in 2013 or so, when I was a volunteer at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto. One of the other volunteers, Nell Coleman, an expert in sashiko design and stitching, led workshops for us to learn sashiko stitching and make blocks for what became this fabulous sashiko stitched quilt. If you’re interested in learning more about boro & sashiko, here’s an interesting article on the Upcycle Stitches website.
Visible mending generally accentuates the mend, making it obvious that this is a repaired item of clothing. Usually my approach is to mend & embellish at the same time, so that the area looks like a decoration, not obviously a mend. I like both approaches, I just have more fun with a variety of embroidery motifs. In the case of my husband’s 2 pairs of pants below, you can see two different approaches: 1) Grey Jeans: I added a piece of fabric inside the knee to provide extra strength, and worked a swirling embroidery design through both layers in simple running stitch. Then I trimmed the interior patch and worked a blanket stitch around the edges to prevent fraying. 2) Blue Jeans: I added a darker blue denim rectangle behind the frayed knee and worked machine zigzag stitch in a zigzag manner across the knee. This one ended up looking vaguely like a landscape!
I like to improvise a design, looking at the area that needs
mending and coming up with a flower or other pattern. Sometimes I use a
bit of thread of the same colour as the fabric to mend the holes first,
then I go ahead with the embroidery, or I’ll just use the embroidery
itself to fix the hole. Examples three and four show flower motifs on two t-shirts. 3) The navy t-shirt has one largish flower worked in stem stitch with French knots. It later ended up with another tiny hole just outside the initial flower, so I added to the embroidery, making a larger more colourful flower. 4) The pink t-shirt already had a lot of colourful machine embroidery, so I made a vine of flowers in similar colours (yes, each one of those flowers represents a hole in the fabric!).
Example five shows a design where I’m getting more carried away with an embroidery story. I don’t remember exactly where the hole was, but now there’s a tiny grey stick figure person climbing up a silver ladder, reaching for a gold pinwheel, rocket, and star, while behind them an exuberant vine of flowers is growing up the ladder and beyond. If only the person would turn around!
It is so liberating to embellish an item of clothing, feeling that I’m helping to reduce fashion waste at the same time that I’m showing the world who I am! The stitches I use most often are very simple: stem stitch, French knots, satin stitch, lazy daisy stitch and chain stitch. Join in, get expressive with your mending! If you’d like to comment or ask questions, please do so on my Facebook page.