Visible mending is a decorative way to fix up an item. Instead of trying to make your mend as invisible as possible, the idea is to make it part of the garment’s design.
Visual mending is not a single technique: it’s more of a mindset. If you’ve got an item you love, it deserves to be mended, and if you’re going to put that love into stitches, why not show them off?
That being said, there are some specific techniques that are popular with visible menders. Let’s take a look!
Sashiko:
Sashiko is a type of traditional Japanese embroidery that is used to both decorate and reinforce fabric. In visible mending, sashiko is often used to cover up holes with patches or to reinforce thinning fabric. This technique uses a variation on the running stitch.
Regular embroideryis also a popular technique to accentuate your mends. Check out my embroidery 101 post to learn how to get started. You can embroider patches, or use embroidery to hide or accentuateany stitches you’ve made to fix holes. Embroidery’s also a great way to cover up stains.
There are many ways to add patches to a garment. My tutorial on patches is a good place to start if you want to make custom-shaped patches to sew on top of your fabric. You can also sew your patch on the inside of your garment and have it peek out from beneath the hole you’re trying to fix. Fun ideas for this are lace or superheroes.
Darning is a technique used to repair holes in fabric by using running stitches to weave extra fabric over the hole as to fill it up again. While traditionally darning is done in an invisible way by using the same colour of thread as your fabric, you can also use contrasting colours to accentuate your fix. Check out this written tutorial on darning by TheSpruceCrafts.
Visible mending is a creative way to fix up your clothes and give them some personality at the same time.
You should be proud of the fact that you took the time and learned the necessary skills needed to mend your clothes! Show off what you did!
A fun side effect of wearing these obvious mends is that people will notice them. They’ll remember your fixes the next time they’re faced with a hole in their wardrobe, and it will make them more likely to try it for themselves.
These are just a few ways to visibly mend your garments. Want more inspiration? Check out Pinterestor r/Visiblemending on Reddit.
the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, “you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?” and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds
it is one thing to be a linguist and another to be a linguist who knows enough of 2010s Tumblr to spot one of its enjoyers
Oh! @meret118 see above comment! The use of the word “enjoyers” instead of “users” or “bloggers” -> You left a comment a while back asking, “Does this just mean vocabulary words? Other than blorbo and sweet cinnamon roll etc, I can’t think of what a Tumblr accent would be.” I almost never see anyone use the word “enjoyer” anywhere outside of tumblr, but I see it on tumblr fairly frequently.
Another one is the verb “perceive” i.e. “don’t perceive me” “I am perceiving” “I am being percieved.” That’s something that feels very specific to tumblr parlance.
There’s the thing where people on tumblr have an emotional reaction to something and instead of, or in addition to telling you how they feel about it using emotion words, they will narrate a fictional action in the present progressive tense. “I am gnawing at the bars of my enclosure "I am kissing you on the mouth” “you are going into the soup” “you are getting all of the awards”
I once saw someone use that response format in … I think it was a restaurant review, or a doordash review, or something like that. It was very unexpected seeing it outside of a tumblr post.
There are a lot of other tumblr linguistic quirks I can’t currently remember off the top of my head, but I’ll instantly recognize them if I see/hear them outside of tumblr. It’s always a bit startling to see them out of context.
I still kinda want to one day write a story featuring a small town that has two barbers - one of them is black and the other is white. The white one is the one who’s specialised in doing afro texture hair, and the black one does straight and wavy texture white people hair. They’re both self-taught, lifelong friends, and learned to cut hair by practicing on each other.
“why do you write?” because it’s the only way to silence the characters pacing around my brain like victorian ghosts with unresolved issues that prevent them from moving on.
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