march 5, 2012

tonight, i mended the most charming socks that i own. i wear these all the time. i've only had them since the fall, and they're already threadbare on one foot.













 see the evidence? i lie not:

thank gawd for darning. i love this new skill of mine. i would even go so far as to posit that darning is just as charming as these socks. imagine that people just throw out socks because of holes like this?

from start to finish, this mending job took me 15 minutes. socks saved.
darning. is. the. best.

you know what? me and my charming socks are going out on the town tomorrow to celebrate the new them. maybe i'll even buy them a drink. other socks welcome! (you know...with people in them. ahem.)

march 4, 2012

one of my goals for 2012 is to spend more time in skirts and dresses. i've been doing awesome so far, thanks to a new collection of tights and fun accessories that were either store-bought or femme-me-downs (hand-me-downs that pass from one femme to another. thanks a. for passing on this amazing term to me!)

tonight, i'm mending a femme-me-down dress that i wore for the first time on saturday night to see taqralik partridge and ursula rucker perform at versefest. it was an amazing show. at some point in the evening, i happened to look down and see a little tear in the dress, right at the base of the little tear-dropped loop in the front. it needed some attention, and i figured why not mend it now?

the dress is lined, so i turned it inside out to make it easier for me to do a stitch that wouldn't show on the multi-coloured fabric.

here's the before:

and here's the after:

guest post from monkeyblend

I'm very inspired by this mending blog. 2011 was a tumultuous year; it was hard for so many reasons. Mostly there was a lot of change, and I felt like I was caught in a Just for Laughs gag reel where someone was pulling the rug out from under my feet. For me, mending in 2012 will be about finding the things that ground me.

On January 1st, 2012, I started what is proving the be the most difficult, multi-step move I have ever done. I have moved before, but I have never moved with the intention of gutting my old room in my parents' house and starting again in my own hometown.

I moved back here last fall to go back to school. My intention was to land at my folks' place (which is here in the city), find a job to support myself while at school and move out on my own once I could afford it. That's not exactly what happened. Instead I settled into an unhealthy but familiar family dynamic and needed to leave sooner than I could really afford to. While I recognize that I was exceptionally lucky and privileged to have a place to land and get back on my feet, I was horrified to notice myself gradually reverting back to "teenage" mode. It was difficult to see the changes in my personality and my relationships that were the side effects of that. I love my parents, but we have very different outlooks on life and different ideas about how I should live.

Maybe everyone has a complicated relationship with their parents for one reason or another? (I have yet to meet anyone who has an easy family dynamic!) For me, I made a decision to leave my parents' place for good at the beginning of 2012 - partly because I wanted to symbolically separate myself from these unhealthy dynamics and stop re-enacting teenagehood. So I started gutting and sorting my room, saving my pennies, and I moved out.

I have a lifetime of stuff in that house so, although I have made some progress in getting rid of stuff, it might take the rest of 2012 to finish the task. In the meantime, I have a new home and I am building a room of my own.

Here are the photos of what I have been able to build so far. Ten points if you can guess the room theme I am working towards!

when in need of glue advice...

...check out this amazing site that my friend c.m. told me about. it advises you on the ideal adhesives to use between materials like metal, paper, leather, material, glass, ceramic, etc. hope it helps you in your mending! :)

march 3, 2012

i set aside some time tonight to mend my mending kit - the vintage one that the fabulous a.w. found for me on etsy. it's so very awesome, and i love that it arrived both equipped for mending and in need of mending. as i started my mending tonight, my roomie received a call that one of her clients was in labour and started preparing her doula bag to go assist at a birth. i thought it was a nice parallel...remembering that, just like this kit, the people who deliver care also need it.

as you can see from the "before" pic above, the top and bottom halves of the kit are held together by one old-ass piece of cardboard that's tearing more by the day. i'm going to reinforce the cardboard with this scrap piece of red leather that one of n.h.'s roommates had in her mending arsenal. hooray for using what's already around for mending. (seriously, that's my favourite!)

okay...so i decided to reinforce the inside and the outside of the kit with leather panels so that it would be extra strong. i figured out super-quickly that i wouldn't get far in this task without a leather needle, so i decided to go with some adhesive that i had handy.

it turned out pretty well. i wasn't sure about the contrasting reds, but i think it looks alright. and, like i've said a million times before, why make the mend blend?

march 2, 2012

tonight, for my mending, i read issue #3 of this zine about chronic pain called "when languages runs dry" and cried about how much my body and my life have changed since the accident. i've been coming to accept the fact that i have this new, different body to work with that has so many more limitations and needs for rest and care. sounds sad, but i think it's good. denial hasn't been helping me.

march 1, 2012

in my yoga lineage, there's this saying: "selfless service will make you divine."

on the surface, that sounds like an ego trip - like it's about indulging an image of yourself as some sort of perfected being who is higher or more evolved than others, but my interpretation is along different lines. in my books, divinity is about accepting wholeness and oneness rather than following a list of rules that tells you where to place yourself in the hierarchy of moral rightness. i believe it's about working to embrace non-compartmentalized thinking, which is rooted in an understanding of the essential interconnectedness of all things. this whole "we are all one" thing isn't just something that creepy new age guys say at parties to get sex. while it's inconvenient and sometimes messy that everything is interconnected, it's just one of those universal truths.

so, yeah, the way i interpret this saying is that offering some kind of gesture of service to someone else reminds you that giving is actually receiving: you are that person, and they are you. we're indivisible because we're all part of the same whole, and taking yourself out of the centre of your thinking and action and motivation for a second reminds you that you can lift yourself up by experiencing the essential oneness we're living all the time. aka divinity. we are all divine, but we need to remember.

offering something to another person, or being, is one of the ways that i can snap out of a slump in a genuine way that's not about rejecting the emotion i'm experiencing. it always lifts me up, without fail. physical pain has been getting me down, making me feel sorta tight and anxious. i needed a lift, so i helped n.h. run some errands, picked out delicious groceries and made dinner for his household and then gave my best friend's horse some tlc out at the barn. serious heart mending, folks. like whoa. i feel all connected and content again whenever i remember that i'm part of this vast life thing that exists in me and everywhere all around me. the same life force in all of us, connecting us.

if you're feeling down, give it a try. i know it can sometimes feel like you don't have enough (time, energy, will) to do anything for anyone else, but it will give back to you, i promise. in energy and inspiration.