November 2024
"We can work on repairing": Lessons from mending circles in Burnaby
In the past few months, For Our Kids Burnaby has hosted two mending circles. People of all ages have come together in community to mend their ripped clothing while catching up with neighbours, meeting new friends, and enjoying snacks. The events have been peaceful and cozy, with all kinds of clothing to fix and mending puzzles to solve; we have repaired everything from torn jeans to insulated grocery bags.
Everyone I know has a bag of ripped clothes stuffed in a closet. You don’t want to throw them away, but you don’t have time to mend them, or you don’t know how. I did the same thing for years. I’d stitch a button back on a shirt and do my best to fix my kids’ favourite sweatpants, but mostly I’d end up buying new clothes, despite my best intentions. The more I learned about the growing impacts of the fashion industry, however, the more I felt like I needed to make a change.
I read once that if everyone learned how to sew one piece of clothing, the fast fashion industry would collapse. It’s not for the reason you might think—that we’ll all become self-sufficient sewers, crafting our own homemade wardrobes—but because we’d all understand the immense skill that goes into making every single article of clothing we own. The more I learn about the underpaid, often underage, workers who are doing this skilled labour in inhumane working conditions, the more I am inspired to mend my clothes and buy second hand. The more I learn about the millions of tonnes of clothing that are discarded every year, or the vast amounts of carbon emissions produced by the fashion industry, the more I want to do my part to disrupt this destructive cycle.
Organizing a mending circle seemed like the next logical step in learning how to fix my family’s clothes. I wanted to share what I’d learned, learn from other menders, and carve out time for this practice. A mending circle brings people together—everyone from experienced menders to people who have never threaded a needle before—and lets them share skills and tips, while giving them a dedicated time to work through their mending pile.
If you’re interested in starting your own mending circle, there are a few supplies you’ll need to get you started. Before our first event, we bought needles, pins, different kinds of thread, and some pieces of fabric in various weights and types. If you have a deadstock fabric store in your community, this is a great resource for supplies. We are fortunate enough to have two in Vancouver: Our Social Fabric and Fabcycle.
We discovered many free resources, as well. Our local public library has a wide selection of books about mending, several of which we checked out to use as guides and inspiration. Many of our participants were able to bring their own supplies, including fabric for patches and sewing scissors. We also upcycled many of our supplies. Often when clothing is too ripped for repair, or your kids have outgrown those torn jeans you tucked away in the closet, these old garments can be given new life as patches for other clothes.
There are all kinds of resources online that can help you organize your first mending circle. One invaluable resource is the Mending Bloc, a mutual aid group in Portland that provides mending zines for free download. We printed a stack of these for our mending table, and all our new menders go home with a copy of the zine and a little introductory mending kit.
We want to make sure that all our events are family friendly, so we welcome children to our mending circles. A few kids have joined us for the mending circle itself, while others have done a fabric upcycling craft. At our first event, a group of kids used upcycled and deadstock fabric to create a quilt-inspired banner, which they carried during the Climate Strike in September!
Mending your clothes can seem like too small an action to make a difference. After all, you might tackle only a single rip in one pair of jeans at a mending circle. However, the skills you take away with you can help you change your mindset toward the clothing you own. Seeing your clothes as worthy of care can help you move toward a circular economy and a more sustainable future. As parents, we can share these skills with our children, showing them that we repair and repurpose things that are broken and torn, rather than throwing them out.
The more committed I become to building a livable future for all our kids, the more I believe that building that future is going to depend on coming together in community to share supplies and skills. Mending circles are one way we can begin to create this kind of community. When things feel too hard—something I think a lot of us are feeling these days—mending can also give us a little hope. We can’t start again from scratch, but we can work on repairing: the knees of our jeans, our communities, and our relationship with the planet.
By Emma Curran, For Our Kids Burnaby
