Visible Mending - Blog Posts

Mending my favourite vintage night gown

I got this nightgown at a vintage shop a few months ago, for not an insignificant amount of money let’s be honest, and it was love at first sight. Unfortunately, I wore it for a single weeks before a nasty tear appeared in the sleeve. I already had to strengthen the neckline trim and patch the inside yoke so it wasn’t a complete surprise, but still, I was kind of pissed off since I paid kind of a lot of money for it. Anyways, here’s my repairing process in pictures:

1) The torn fabric (zoom on the picture to see just how bad it was)

2) Basting the patch. The fabric was so worn I used two patches, one inside and one outside, to securely sandwich the delicate zone and prevent future tearing.

3) I was loosely inspired by sashiko for the mending so, last night I went into a mending rampage and drew a grid before starting on the stitching proper, making up a pattern as I went on. No picture of the grid pre-stitching because it was 11pm and I had lost any sense of time and space.

4) The patched up nightgown, with the topmost buttonhole strengthened before it started spontaneously disintegrating too.

I am super happy with my pseudo-sashiko mending pattern and will really research this technique of embroidery and mending for future use!

little things that i try to do to get more out of my clothes

I finally got around darning the toe of my favourite knitted socks!

I’ve had them for six years at this point and basically live (and sleep) in these socks all winter, and they are starting to fall apart; but I will darn them until nothing of the original yarn is left and then some more! They are from some generic fast fashion brand and I’m kind of surprised by how well they hold the constant use.

The purple yarn originally served to tie together a pair of leg-warmers my mum gifted me from a super cute and knitting and sewing shop. It was the perfect length to darn the hole in the toe of my sock.

The blue darned patch is from last year, I think, and it’s some sort of poly yarn leftover I found in my mum’s box of miscellaneous sewing and knitting supplies. I just had to pull in a few threads that came loose before they broke.

All of this! I love natural materials; they last beautifully, are easy to mend on your own, and don't look dingy after 3 washes. The only real problem is you must learn how to do laundry properly rather than dump all of your clothes together into the washer with 2 tide pods and then blast them with the dryer 1-3 times. Like... A waxed cotton canvas barn coat is significantly warmer than my polyester polyfill jackets on drippy dark hikes, wool & cotton socks don't give me blisters, silk (actual silk, not nylon and elastane) stockings don't give me rashes on the backs of my thighs. Natural materials are your friends!

Idk exactly how to explain this but the softness of real wool and real linen is very different from the artificial softness of polyester “sherpa”, fuzzy faux-fur, spongey acrylic knits and people have gotten too used to the soft plastics and now associate wool with “itchy” and linen with rough and cotton with “too heavy” and then go and wear 100% polyester fleecy sweatshirts and say it’s so warm and cozy but actually they’re just staticky cooking in their sweat locked inside a plastic membrane and you are paying too much to be wearing filaments of petroleum products and the money isn’t going to the people sewing them either. I’m saying you all need to touch grass and the grass in this situation is good quality textiles made of natural fibres.

finished the pants!!