Maximum Class Size: 8
Open to all levels
Join Melanie for a practical and creative approach to hand mending garments and home textiles. Referencing ancient and traditional methods passed down through different cultures and generations, you'll rediscover forgotten techniques and develop a creative approach to repair, playing with fabric, colour, and stitch.
This session explores how repair can add emotional value to garments and contribute to their continuing narrative through fabric and stitch. Celebrate the benefits of mending and slow stitching as a form of mindfulness and wellbeing.
Using Ray Stitch fabric scraps, you'll patch, darn, and stitch to create a sampler for future reference. By the end of the session, you'll have the confidence, knowledge, and ideas to apply mending techniques to your own garments for years to come.
What you will learn:
Plain patching - Basic patch
Visible patching - Sashiko and Boro work
Mending stitches - Blanket stitch, Honeycomb stitch, Parachute stitch
Visible mending - Darning techniques
Tutor Melanie Bowles is the founder of Stitch-School and a mending artist who extends the life of treasured garments through hand stitching. She is passionate about the benefits of embroidery within communities and for individuals, and has worked on numerous community projects bringing people together through stitching and shared narratives. Her clients include the V&A, the Barbican Centre, Oxfam, Alexander McQueen, and Marie Curie. Her recent practice focuses on reflecting, extending, and building new narratives with cloth through mending and embroidery.
