Visible Mending on a Mitten

My niece gave me this pair of hand knit mittens for Christmas a few years ago. I often wear them to walk the dogs.

I use a two hand hold on dog leads. The right hand holds the lead with the handle loop over my right right thumb. The left hand holds the lead on the side that is attached to the dog. It allows me a very secure hold and allows me to steer the dog, to bring her closer to be or let her have more length. As a result, the lead slides along the palm of the left mitten a lot.

With time, the yarn on the left palm was getting thin. And even worse, the mitten was getting drafty!

Thinning yarn on a mitten

For this repair I referenced Visible Mending by Jenny Wilding Cardon and Tom van Deijnen’s great mending blog, tomofholland .

I used a basic woven darn. I used plain green worsted wool yarn which I knew would felt from the heat of my hands as I wear the mitten. In fact, after just a few days, the repair is already starting to settle and felt into the brown wool of the mitten!

I stitched an vertical in-and-out on the “ladders” between the rows. After doing that in all the threadbare areas, I wove in and out across horizontally across the rows. It was a bit tricky—the horizontal green yarn kept sliding under the larger brown yarn. As a result, my darning isn’t perfectly woven, but it has turned out to be just fine.

This project wraps up my mending month of February! I had a lot of fun learning more about mending and am happy to have repaired a pair of pants, a mitten and a quilt!

And that’s not all! At the Proper Bostonian Quilt Guild meeting the day before Valentine’s Day, we had a hands-on workshop on Japanese Boro mending which uses multiple layers of patches with sashiko stitching. We were told there was going to be a Valentine workshop but not what we where going to be doing. So I was delighted to find out it was another take on what I’d been doing all month!

Here is my Boro Valentine. All supplies, including the hand-painted wood frame, were supplied by the woman running the workshop. Pretty sweet!!

Notice: This blog is not monetized: I do not use affiliate links. When there are links in a post, they are to give credit to another creative person, because I like or have used a product, or to help the reader easily find supplies for a project.

Visible Mending on a Quilt

For years I had a delightful neighbor who was older and at home most of the time. She loved all animals and asked to look in on my puppies which was completely awesome back in the day when there weren’t many dog walkers. As she got older, my neighbors and I shoveled the snow off her sidewalk, picked up occasional groceries that she needed and regularly stopped to chat with her.

Just before she moved to senior housing, one of her daughters made each of us a quilt to say thanks. Recently I noticed one of the seams in a block had failed. There wasn’t enough fabric to recreate a new 1/4 inch seam. Visible mending seemed like the perfect solution to repair the fractured block.

Separated seam in a quilt block, top center of the block.

I used Jessica Marquez’s Make and Mend as the resource for the sashiko design and information on sewing the patch. I picked the zigzag pattern and used grey sashiko thread for the stitching. (It took me a while to find some readily available sashiko thread but i finally found a wonderful collection of sashiko thread in multiple colors that were in stock and ready to ship at Purl Soho).

First I did a slip stitch to bring together the two fabrics in the open seam. Then I measured a cut a patch from a solid red cotton for the patch. Then I drew a 1/2 inch grid on the block with a Fons & Porter chalk pencil and pinned it to the quilt block.

Then I stitched the sashiko pattern per the instructions in the book. It only took me two hours to do all the stitching. I was surprised how quickly it stitched up!

Here is the quilt with the repaired patch. I’m really happy with the repair. Rather than being a detraction, it adds interest to this special quilt.

The sashiko mend plays happily with the blocks in this quilt. (Its in the far left rowd, 3rd block down).

Next time I’ll share a repair on a knit—-a mitten I use for dog walks.

Notice: This blog is not monetized: I do not use affiliate links. When there are links in a post, they are to give credit to another creative person, because I like or have used a product, or to help the reader easily find supplies for a project.

Book Review: "Visible Mending, Artful Stitchery to Repair and Refresh Your Favorite Things"

More on mending! Visible Mending, Artful Stitchery to Repair and Refresh Your Favorite Things , by Jenny Wilding Cardon, is a great resource for anyone who wants to mend their own clothes, thrift store finds, and stained or torn children’s clothes.

This is a fun book which covers 5 different types of mending—Japanese Boro menidng which uses sashiko type stitching, hand embroidery, patches, darning and using a sewing machine to mend.

Each of the techniques has a list of supplies that will be needed and clear, tutorial-type photo illustrations of each step in the repair.

I love the author’s story about a repair on her son’s T-shirt (see above, the bright teal grid of squares in upper right corner). He loved it so much he wanted to wear it to school the next day. He couldn’t because it was needed as an illustration for this book, but she sent him off to look in his drawers to find another shirt in need of repair! If that’s not a vote of confidence, I don’t know what is!

Jenny has some really fun repairs: inset circles, holes left in place but turned into features with embroidery stitches that accent while stabilizing the hole, and woven darned repairs.

She doesn’t just have repairs for clothes. There is one on a the rubber of a pair of beloved sneakers and other on an American flag (with information about what repairs can and can not be done on a flag).

And finally, for folks who don’t want to do hand repairs, there a collection of machine mends with instruction s on how to do them.

This is a very useful book and I’m happy to own it because many of the techniques resonate with techniques used in quilting. It is also a book that will be great for a busy parent or a thrifter who is recycling and accenting old clothes.