Now Is When We All Learn to Darn Our Socks Again

This is a fab article in the New York Times with Kate Sekules, who is not aonly an amazing artist and author in her own right but also prescient enough to identify our friend and Textile Arts LA member Ruth Katzenstein Souza as a fellow mender extraordinaire - and therefore to feature her in her upcoming book. Whew. That was a run-on!

Only a few generations ago, socks were routinely darned, sweaters mended and pants patched. You could buy a sewing kit at any drugstore. Knowing how to use it was a mark of good housekeeping.

Kate Sekules, 58, remembers that world, in which the act of repairing clothes was integral to wearing them. “My mother was a dressmaker to the end of her life,” said Ms. Sekules, who grew up in England. “My mother just mended as a matter of course.”

Ms. Sekules has kept up that thrifty tradition. She started one of the earliest secondhand online clothing exchanges, Refashioner. She buys all of her clothes vintage and mends them all, including her husband’s moth-eaten sweaters.

You can find the original article here.

As a cri de coeur on behalf of needle and thread, Ms. Sekules practices and preaches “visible mending,” as it is known in the sewing and fashion communities. On visiblemending.com she offers inspiration and instruction to the unversed and posts photos of creatively salvaged clothes.

There are numerous how-to books, like “Visible Mending: Artful Stitchery to Repair and Refresh Your Favorite Things” by Jenny Wilding Cardon, and the forthcoming “Mending Life,” by Nina and Sonya Montenegro, sisters who run the art collective the Far Woods. This month brings “Wear, Repair, Repurpose” by Lily Fulop. And in September, Penguin will publish Ms. Sekules’s own book, “MEND! A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto.”