Sewing can be oddly soothing

I spent about an hour this morning trying to avoid jabbing myself with a sharp metal object. The experience was more satisfying than I would have expected–not just because it left me without injury, but because it left me with a inexpertly patched pair of jeans.

I’ve been sewing buttons back in place since I was in high school, that being one of many things my mom taught me to do. It’s not hard, it doesn’t take that long, and even if you need to make this repair away from home, you’ve got decent odds of a hotel room including a mending kit with all the materials needed.

It took me a little while longer to get in the habit of picking up a needle and thread to sew together a tear in a shirt or a pair of pants. That’s not too difficult either, plus you get the satisfaction of restoring an item of clothing to service without having to pay somebody to do it.

Then I devoted part of a Saturday in July to level up my mending game at a free clothing-repair tutorial in Arlington hosted by Art on the Mend (yes, that is me in the picture on the home page), a program founded by cartographer Alison Davis-Holland.

With a small room’s worth of people, I got some hands-on coaching in picking the right kind of fabric to patch an item of clothing, a few different stitching techniques to employ for the work, and how to proceed with it. The “why” of this lesson was just as important: not only because it’s cost-effective to repair something, but because that act of DIY mending personalizes that object.

And it allows you the chance to put some creativity into the required stitching, as Davis-Holland showed with some of her own fine work.

I left the class with a pair of jeans in which a developing rip in the wallet pocket had been sewn up–with a lot of help from the attendee seated next to me–as well as a set of fabric patches to use in other fabric-repair attempts.

Saturday morning was one of them, involving another pair of jeans that needed patching. (I don’t remember Levi’s wearing that badly in my younger days, but maybe I just keep them longer now.) Sewing a patch on fabric that’s begun to fray is more work than re-attaching a button to an intact shirt, especially if you’re not that practiced at this task, and so I had to take my time with it.

But I also found this exercise so oddly soothing that I didn’t mind the minutes going by. Slip the needle and thread through, send it back, through and back, through and back… and the risk of poking yourself with the pointy end forces a level of concentration that my screen time rarely allows.

See also: why I’m so crazy about gardening and cooking, two other hobbies that help me less like a digital man and more like the analog kid I once was.

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