Recap: mending meeting with Lauren Callis

[Devon Olson]

Hello again all!

Boy did we have a fruitful discussion last Friday talking about mending in community with Lauren Callis. At the bottom is an image of the resources Lauren uses for her presentations, and directly below are my major take-home points from our meeting, with links for resources that were mentioned. Please do chime in if you have other related things to share or new questions to pose!

• mending has a long history that mirrors ours
  
• its rise and fall is mirrored by societal shifts: clothing was initially such important and long-lived property that it used to be written into folks' wills, later the industrial revolution and rise of synthetic fibers created a throwaway culture of overconsumption
• SlowFactory has a whole lot of resources, in addition to initiatives and classes built around fashion as a driver for "social, cultural, and environmental change". They also curate a pretty good instagram account.
• Global north can perpetuate these problems to the global south, waste within textile industry
• Be aware of greenwashing, Laura has a course on sustainability literacy
  
• The most sustainable item is the thing you already have. That’s the best practice you can do
• cultural appropriation within mending
• cultural appropriation of mending techniques has been a thing on instagram for a while now (years), and in the wake of the shootings in Georgia folks are speaking out specifically against folks (re white people) appropriating and fetishizing sashiko stitching. It is past time for this.
  
• if you google "sashiko", you'll see that both Free People and Urban Outfitters are still selling "sashiko" clothing. I'm not even going to link it here, your fantasy is probably the right level of awful.
• lauren answered a question about how to respond or continue mending without being appropriative (Please correct me, R., if this isn't quite right)
• Lauren foregrounded citing her inspirations whenever she feels they have impacted her work, as well as continuously doing research and crediting those culturally-bounded mending techniques, like sashiko
• Kantha quilts in the Bangladesh region of India
• Sashiko in Japan
  
• Boro in Japan
• Gee's Bend quilts in the southern U.S.
• Bojagi quilts in Korea
• how do we mend
• look at your fabric, knitted fabric must be repaired with a different technique than woven fabric
• find old mending tools at a thrift store, like a darning egg
• or use a lightbulb to darn your sock
• look at this "colored blown glass darning egg or whimsey"!!!
• Mending as an agent of change
• "Folk Fashion" by Amy Twigger Holroyd, homemade clothes as radical
  
• Screenwork can create a fractured sense of self, while handwork can encourage a sense of embodiment and connection (this is me paraphrasing Emma Shercliff)
• Lauren's 3 foot rule: "I have a tendency to be really hard on myself when something that’s close up...But stand back and you probably won’t notice any faults"

Lauren Callis Resource List March 2021.png

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Thank you all! Happy first week of Spring!

Devon

Information Maintainers Co-facilitator