mending shenaniganery

when a quarantine hobby takes on a life of its own. will be mostly goals and ideas

[rondleberg]

Finished the latest mend literally right before I had to leave for a flight not perfect but it'll do

[s-u-w-i]

Normally, I wouldn't share photos of myself, but I was sewing a bit, so here you go. Old duvet cover transformed into a frilly shirt, haha.

[thirrith]

fixed the holes in my pyjama trousers. the patching fabric matches because it came from the pyjama top from the same set that became beyond fixable (rip)

[florad0ra]

fun upcycle/repair from today

[redstonedust]

pet peeve is when you look up fashion references from a specific era and you keep getting modern day '[era]-inspired' fashion like NO i want authenticity damn it. i can see your 2020 photo quality and your 2020 hair and your 2020 makeup. youre not fooling me.

[bincliff]

hello i'm a historical fashion researcher and i have a lot of experience looking up things! this is a very widely experienced irritation and you're definitely not alone in this, but i am here to share everything i know!

so, ways to get around this:

turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us

don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace

a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)

instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian

including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too

including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue

for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend

when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!

if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache

some online resources and museum collections:

fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples

the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates

costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)

v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece

lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces

nypl digital collection for photographs

national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art

national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific

stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource

wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain

auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!

anyway, i hope this has been a good place to start for anyone interested! there are probably some i've missed because there are so many museums across the world and i don't know about all of them or can't remember them. but these are the ones i've used the most! (my specialisation/jobs i've had to research for have only really been in western fashion, so my resources reflect that)

[haemey]

Wikipedia has a list of fashion museums. Unfortunately, the page itself is only available in German, but the introductory paragraph is very short and after that, it's organised by country, and then it's a simple list. If you click on a museum's article, the website is usually linked in the overview table.

[rustbeltbby]

darning samples at the art institute of chicago

[shadesofmauve]

Pocket ferns! A big embroidery to cover one tiny hoke. Something's still not right with the lowest leaves, but all in all I'm really pleased.

I used two strands of embroidery floss, one yellow green and one mid green, because I didn't have the color i wanted. I'm glad I did; I love the effect of two different colors!

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

Practical sewing and stitching techniques (Mending holes and altering lengths)

[rederiswrites]

The trouble with mending, and all the cute visible mending trends especially, is that mending is predicated on the idea that what you have is an essentially sturdy garment that has worn out in a high-wear area or gotten damaged/torn. Whereas what most of us are actually dealing with is cheaply made shit that has simply given out at the first sign of adversity. If you mend something that's weak to begin with, it's entirely likely that it will just tear at the edge of the mend, which will suddenly be the strongest part of the garment. Or if your shirt has worn through or ripped out at the seam, it's just a crap shirt, and you can fix that seam, but another will give soon, and you have to make an honest assessment of whether the work you put in is worth it. My cheap Hanes white cotton socks blow out at the heels far faster than they ever used to, and fuck a bunch of that, but I'd never bother darning them. They'll just blow out at the toes in a month.

I don't have a solution to offer for this that doesn't involve spending either more money or more time. It is still barely possible to buy quality clothing, but it costs more than most of us can afford. And you can still make your own clothing, but as the skills and tools become less common, it's all the harder to learn. All I can say is look around, make a real assessment of your resources (like, say, Grandma still has a working machine and a stash of probably unfashionable but maybe cute fabric, or you think you can afford two pairs of good work pants a year and then keep them mended), and do your best.

[ironcowboyphantom]

Finished patching jeans

Snails and bats and a unicorn (patterns from @beyondthisdarkhouse)! Oh my!

All the other patterns either freestyled or sketched from references. Still need to replace those thigh patches but one thing at a time.

[shadesofmauve]

Damning intensifies

[fredsfavoriteredspoon]

Did some reinforcement in my pants. Sometimes I take a break from posting about vampires to post sashiko!

[slowstitchclub]

[just-late-roman-republic-things]

The one bizarre thing to me about textiles is that warp-weighted weaving is at least 6500 years old, but our oldest knitted artifacts are only ~1000 years old, and crochet 200 years old. Even though you need less equipment to knit (two sticks) or crochet (one hook) compared to warp-weighted weaving (frame, loom weights, batting, heddles). Why the big gaps between these inventions? And why did each one appear and spread when it did?

[dinosaurcharcuterie]

Oooh, I know this one! Well, the knitting one. The commonly given reasons, at least.

Firstly, you don't just need two sticks. You need at least two (fairly) identically sized, (fairly) identically weighted, straight, smooth sticks that are strong enough to carry the weight of what you're making. Which isn't impossible to do with bronze age technology, but it's gonna take time or money. And every time you change gauge of thread, or want a different tightness of fabric from the same artisan, you need a new size of needles. A loom is more flexible about these things. Nalbinding, which looks very similar and fills a similar niche, is more flexible about these things and uses way less resources.

Secondly, it's probably older than the 12th century sock find. That thing has colorwork and a shortrow heel. Not something you do instinctually, not something you figure out on your first or second or fourth attempt if you've never seen it done. So we know it's older. We also know from contextual evidence that it doesn't show up in texts or art or myths before the Middle Ages, so... Not hugely older. It's hard to find archaeological evidence because almost every part of knitting, until fairly recently, was made of material that loves to decay. And if you were to find a knitting needle... It's a pointy stick. Made of wood, maybe bone. Even in the context of lying in a dwelling, that could be many, many things. Loom weights are slightly easier to categorize.

Then there's the fact that most knitted garments, while wonderfully stretchy and drapey, have a tendency to wear out fast. (It's why most commercial sock yarns these days tend to be reinforced with nylon.) Since the panels are made of one continuous thread without knotting off, you get a hole bigger than what can be easily mended much more quickly. So you need incentive to choose it over other, older, proven methods.

[just-late-roman-republic-things]

Good points, and when you mentioned "thread" something clicked for me - it's really hard to knit thread, i.e. laceweight yarn or thinner, into solid fabric. You need needles no bigger than toothpicks, which break easily even if they're solid steel, and if the size is even just 1mm off it'll make the fabric too stiff or too loose. And every knitter will need a different size of needles to produce a particular gauge of fabric, and you can't have more than one knitter work on the same fabric at once. It may also be slower and harder on your hands than weaving, since there's no way to form "sheds" and knit multiple stitches at once with only Neolithic tools.

So: Harder, and probably slower to work. Fragile tools, which are probably difficult to make in standardized sizes. Hard to get a consistent gauge you can price for the market. Like you said, these issues aren't impossible, but they might make it less economical, and less likely to become popular.

It's probably not a coincidence that our earliest knitted artifacts are socks, which are A) more durable than most knitted clothes, B) normally knit with heavier yarn than thread, and C) an item much more suited to knitting than weaving, so there's a stronger incentive.

I don't know much about how durable knitting is compared to weaving, but I'm not sure if that'd be a big factor in limiting its spread. Either kind of fabric can be felted for strength, and you can reinforce knitting with heel stitch or duplicate stitch, even years after you made the object. (My socks start wearing thin after about 6-8 years, and reinforcing an old sock takes about an hour.) But if this is easier to do on woven fabric, I'd be delighted to learn about that, too!

[amymon-arachne]

Weaving is also faster and takes up less yarn, since the threads are all running parallel to each other and not making loops. Plain weave is fast compared to knitting or crochet.

When you have to produce all textile goods for your family, of course you’re going to go for economy. I saw somewhere that it would generally take two or three hand-spinners to produce enough yarn for one weaver, so I can’t imagine how that would translate to knitting or crochet which use a lot more yarn.

Also, worn out woven fabric can be cut down and repurposed into other useful items, while knitting and crochet would come apart if you tried to cut it.

So it makes sense that knitting and crochet would take longer to gain popularity, since they take up more resources.

[just-late-roman-republic-things]

These are also great points, thank you! (Also, the work on your blog is beautiful!)

[chromatographic]

As a multicrafter I'm going to point out another thing here, too! We've talked a bit about how woven items are efficient, but naalbinding, more than knitting, is truly an efficient use of your resources in conjunction with weaving.

Naalbinding, as mentioned above, is much older than knitting! It uses what is essentially a single large-eyed needle similar to a tapestry needle. A type of needle that you could also use while making your weavings. But additionally, while knitting and crochet are ideal for using a long, single length of yarn, Naalbinding excels at using shorter lengths of yarn - If I use anything longer than 3 ft (about 1m) I run into problems very quickly.

Now when you're weaving? Any loom is going to have waste yarn in the warp - this is how it holds the tension needed to weave. Even on the small table looms I've worked with these scraps can be about 1-2 ft of yarn - a great size for Naalbinding, but extremely difficult to use for knitting or crochet. It's very efficient to take these weaving ends - yarn and thread that's already been worked heavily to simply get into yarn for the weaving! - and use them for naalbinding.

We don't really weave socks because, well. They're a tube. And not just a tube, but to be comfortable, it's a closed tube! With a curvy end! and decreases! This would be really hard to make via weaving, which excels in Flat Rectangles (see: why a lot of Ancient clothing was Flat Rectangles with Fancy Pinning) and simpler shapes.

Even knitting has some issues with socks - though I'm fairly sure knitted socks are going to be more comfortable than naalbound ones, as the fabric has a more even drape. It's not just two even sticks of the same size that you need for knitting a tube - it's a minimum of four. Usually five!

It's also easier to make increases and decreases in naalbinding than knitting, IMO. A closed tube is honestly ideal for the craft, especially if you are fitting it to yourself or a close relative as a mitten or a sock. Like, say, when you're both crafting next to the campfire and every row or two you can hold up the item against their body, and be sure you're on the right track for the fit.

Naalbinding is slower than knitting, overall, but in a more resource poor society it makes a lot more use of those scraps of yarn that you've already put hours and hours of work into making. And they won't go to waste.

[oonajaeadira]

@ithinkwehitametaphor

[ithinkwehitametaphor]

Another thing about Naalbinding is that it doesn't unravel the same as knitting. You cannot just pull on a thread and unravel the fabric because Naalbinding is essentially the joining of knots. The downside of that is that it's more work to iron out mistakes if you have to go back and redo a part of your fabric. A big pro, however, is that holes from wear tend not to get big so fast and are thus much easier to mend. Also, as has been mentioned before, Naalbinding is pretty "forgiving" when you make a slight mistake because increases and decreases are easy to make. As for comfort, a well bound sock is very comfortable, imho. It is very durable as well!

[hattedhedgehog]

I've finally finished my Dread Wolf tarot embroidery from Dragon Age Inquisition! Clocking in at 64 hours of work, it measures 11.5 X 19.5 cm and I've been chipping away it during my downtime at work. My fellow community council members on Dragon Age: The Veilguard may have been biased while helping me choose which character's card to do, but I'm so grateful they did because it was so much fun to work on, and so different from the previous ones.

This is my fourth large Dragon Age character card project, and the first one I started since I uprooted everything to train as a costumer. Having a portable yet elaborate project was comforting while travelling for new experiences.

Now, who's excited for the new game later this year?!

[magpiecoded]

before and after darning over the hole on the heel of my sock

[sarahvansloten]

Trésor treasure (2025), reusable synthetic fabric restaurant bag fortified with yarn and thread (scanned in two pieces)