Reflections on Needing Repair and Pursuing Mending

In the fall of 2024 I found myself at the precipice of a major life shift. I had been trying in earnest the past two years to maintain my full-time professional career path while also assuming ownership and management of the ARQ Barn following my father’s passing in February of 2023.

I was managing the business somewhat effectively, and contributing meaningfully in my professional spaces. But my personal spaces were falling woefully short of a healthy balance. My body was giving out on me - constant pain in my joints, and compounding strange symptoms that limited my movement and my energy in ways that scared me. My relationships with friends and family were fracturing because I’d been stretched too thin for too long, and for love, expansiveness, and generosity to flourish - the key elements to a healthy intimate community - in reciprocity there needs to be some amount of resilience and joy left in the body to offer it back.

I knew I needed to quit my job to focus on my health, but also in the midst of the other big political/social shifts happening in America that autumn, I also felt called to offer something back to my community. Contribute my skills in a different way than my non-profit board stewardship, or monthly volunteer energies.

I was reflecting a lot on the notion of “repair.” Thinking about what repairing and healing my own body might look like, and that of course brought to mind the most visible of the repair actions I participate in. My long practice of mending and repairing the garments of my household.

I’ve been a hobby hand-sewist since high school. I usually have a few projects going, and actively pursue every textile workshop in my community through my own interest, but never from a monetary lens. Over the course of 2023 and 2024 amidst the exhaustion of my overwhelming number of responsibilities I managed to attend a few public “Repair Cafes”. Community-coordinated events where people brought in their own damaged goods, and experts in the room helped them with repair.

In these spaces I would bring items from my own overflowing mending basket - something I was neglecting at home through my exhaustion, but if I was in a group setting I felt able to sit and focus on the work. Even the community of strangers made it easier for me to do solo work. I also found that in these community sewing circles I was offering advice and helping with sewing tips and tricks more than I was asking for it.

Quite unexpectedly I realized that my dogged self-education of hobbyist sewing over the last 20 years (if you count my 20s + college + high school + middle school) I had acquired a breadth of textile skills and knowledge that I was able to share and communicate with others.

I’d been advocating for sustainable fashion choices in my personal circles for a number of years, and proudly showing off my own mends and promoting ethical fashion on my social platforms. And as I thought what choosing to heal my body and shift from my space of constant “over-production”, I thought about how the concept, material, practice, and mindfulness of mending was maybe the mantra I needed to hold close to me moving into this next phase of my life.

I’d heard of the Sustainable Finger Lakes Neighborhood Micro-Grants before through my various non-profit roles, and had contributed to organizational grant writing before - but had never written a personal grant.

I tallied up the items I would need to buy to host a workshop series with multiple participants, wrote out my proposal for four free textile mending workshops in rural Tompkins County, and submitted it in late October. I received it just a few weeks later.

I was elated to receive the first grant, it just covered materials, and couldn’t cover any of my time, but the act of applying for and receiving something for myself, centered around a skill I have worked hard to attain felt huge.

It felt like a mending of my heart, and a step towards sustainability both in the public fashion of my community, and in my own practices for a sustainable healthy life in my own body.

(Part 1 of 3 reflecting on my first public textile repair workshops)