About Visible Mending

Visible Mending is fixing your clothes in ways that reveal your work, rather than downplay it. It was cool with the hippies of yesteryear, and it’s become cool with all kinds of folks today. Try a search for it on Instagram, and you’ll find a million beautiful pictures of visible mends. It’s inspiring!

“Invisible mending” is really just the mending of yesteryear, when repair artists (like my mom, and my grandma) fixed stuff so that the fix wasn’t easy to find. An Instagram search for “mending sweaters” will bring you a million beautiful pics and videos of skillful folks mending moth holes with exactly the right yarn, exactly the right tension and exactly the right knowledge, such that their work is utterly indistinguishable from the garment’s original state. Also inspiring! Currently, I’ve gotten skillful with “plain-weave darning,” which doesn’t replicate the sweater’s knitted structure. It’s great for Visible Mends, as it makes a sturdy repair and stands out a bit anyhow, making contrasting colors sensible.