Why mending in community matters

What I learned from a year of teaching people to mend

From December of 2023 to August of 2024 I ran a mending club. We met once a month on Tuesday evenings, as well as some scattered weekend days across various neighborhoods in NYC. 

My goal was to provide an informal space both for people who already enjoyed mending to work on their projects, and for folks who were interested in learning to get guidance. It was nonspecific by design, in part because I was curious what would come from the open endedness. 

Over those 9 months I recorded data around who came to the mending club, what projects they worked on, and what skills they learned. The data isn’t perfect by any means, because it’s based on me jotting things down and some months I didn’t record data, but it still shows some interesting lessons. 

1. Mending with others transforms a task that might otherwise be tedious and prone to delay into a more fun and satisfying experience.

A common sentiment expressed by attendees at Mending Club was how rewarding it felt to accomplish something they had been meaning to for “so long”. While shopping is often seen as a fun and social part of fashion, mending and clothing maintenance is viewed more as a “chore;” something that's responsible to do but gets set aside for later. I think the flipping of this script by making mending social can help us get the same dopamine that we get from shopping for something new.

2. Mending is easier to learn than it’s often perceived as, and having support takes a lot of the stress away. 

Perceived skill levels of mending club attendees

I collected data about who attended mending club and my perception of their skill level. These two charts show the results, with the right hand chart including repeat attendees. 

I noticed that people who had never been exposed to sewing before expressed some level of stress about having no idea where to start or what was necessary, but showing up to a space advertised as offering guidance for beginners eased that mental barrier to entry for them. This lines up with a finding from a study by researchers at University College London that not only a lack of skills, but also a lack of confidence in one’s skills (due to the perceived difficulty or ease of the task) was a common barrier to people repairing their clothing. 

But, when I looked over the data that included repeat attendees I noticed how I categorized some of those who first came as a beginner as intermediate when they came to their next event. By giving people a comfortable and safe starting place with some guidance, Mending Club provided a way to practice and form a habit on their own in the future. After mending clubs I’d find myself getting messages from attendees who finished their projects at home, or started something new on their own later on. 

This shows that in reality, mending is a more attainable skill than people realize. 

3. Mending together facilitated new and deeper connections in and to the slow fashion community. 

Through making new connections at Mending Club, I realized that we could serve as a way to introduce attendees to other people and organizations working in slow fashion and climate. Some of this happened naturally; anecdotally, I found that the most common way new people found Mending Club was by word of mouth from a friend. In addition, we physically brought Mending Club to other parts of the slow fashion community, by holding it in related spaces; whether it be a low waste coffee shop, a sunny vintage studio, a sustainability focused boutique, a sewing non-profit, or even on the NYC Subway in conjunction with the photography project @subwayhands. 

4. Small acts become more meaningful when we look at ourselves as part of a collective instead of through an individual lens

With the increasing anxiety we face about the atrocities around us, learning to fix a hole in a sweater can feel insignificant. But I know firsthand that there is something healing about slowing down, connecting with others, and mending something tangible that you have the power to fix.

And in reality, our acts of repair really add up over time! Over the past year, I ran or volunteered at 15 mending events, where people mended more than 121¹ items of clothing. In a world where people wear their clothes less and more end up in landfills, these acts of repair are in fact radical.

I’ll leave you with an excerpt from my “mending club manifesto”, a note that I wrote in the front of the guest book for Mending Club. 

“Mending is about more than just repair, we believe that clothes carry stories. By coming together to mend in community, we are not only continuing the story of each piece, but also contributing to a bigger story. One about care for each other and the earth, about resisting systems of exploitation and overconsumption, and creating the world we want to live in.” 

Thanks for reading my first substack post! If you are interested in following my mending experiments and tutorials, you can find me on instagram or tiktok @frontporchthreads, but I also plan to start using this Substack for some longer form content

1. Here’s some data from a few of the events that shows a breakdown of what people worked on.