Season of the Stitch

I mean witch

Well, it’s flu season and both of my mom’s caregivers are out sick, so it’s been an exhausting week. (I’m getting my flu shot today!) But before this all came down, I’d become entranced by a short video demonstrating Sashiko, a Japanese hand-sewing technique also known as visible mending, where the repair embellishes a garment.

If you’ve been around for a while you may have seen my less intentionally visible mending of some cashmere sweaters. But being able to renew my worn and oh-so-comfortable clothes makes me happy to a ridiculous degree, especially when it comes to three pairs of soft stretch jeans, over a decade old, in a cut and fit that’s no longer available. And happier still when it involves a trip to Mood! (Though I later discovered I could more easily—and cheaply—have bought some used jeans at a nearby thrift store for the patch material. Ah, well.)

I’m generally crafty, but I’m also stubborn, impatient, and often-sloppy crafty. With the first pair, miscalculations required starting over and—once I’d tracked down and rewatched the video several times—a few steps had to be redone. Also ah, well, but chalked up to a learning curve, and I was pretty pleased with the final result above. Funkalicious, no?

I thought I was well-prepped for my second pair and, imagining it would create a kind of medieval tapestry effect, I was excited to use a multi-colored thread. But while the thread itself was bright, the effect it created against the denim was downright dull, and ultimately so disappointing I wound up redoing the entire thing. (Stubborn, like I said.)

Aside from not evoking a tapestry, the multi-colored crosses look oddly like grave markers, whereas the blue and white of the redo suggests the flight of a flock of birds. (Or so I tell myself.) And I deliberately left some of the dashes uncrossed, which I kinda wished I’d done with the first pair.

Since my little spate of stitchery, I’ve seen people do much more amazing things with Sashiko, and I’m aware that my bouts of mending refer obliquely to unfixable things. I’m just glad to still be wearing my jeans. And to know that when the threadbare knees of the third pair give out—the ones I’m wearing in that photo in front of Mood—I’ll have the means at hand to make them last for a few more years.

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