It started out innocently enough. I was giving a talk at the Garden Club and I wore a cotton shirt that had been torn in the wash. I had mended it after watching a few Sashiko-mending videos on YouTube. I explained to the gardeners that cotton is a very dirty crop. Cotton production uses heaps of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and synthetic fertilizer that destroys the carbon in the soil and strips the soil of life and fertility. The current way of cultivating cotton is a disaster for the Living Earth.
After the talk, Wendy Pope approached me and asked if I would give a Sashiko-mending demonstration at the Mending Cafe she had suddenly decided to host. I said, “Sure,” because if I can do this sort of mending successfully, and I find it fun, then almost anyone can do it. I am not a sewing maven; I can barely sew at all.
Nancy Hoyano will give a talk and demonstration on Boro and Sashiko as she is an expert at it. Nancy creates beautiful art pieces with Boro which is a Japanese style of patchwork and Sashiko which is a sort of embroidery style, also Japanese in origin and all the rage at the moment.
Sashiko started as a way to sew layers of cotton or linen together to make it warmer. The traditional style is to use navy-blue cotton or linen for the cloth and heavy, white thread for the stitching. I had a look at this and mended a couple of garments and people liked the work I did. I used colourful embroidery thread so my mending is Sashiko inspired, not the real thing! A couple of ladies I know are such talented craftswomen that they can make wedding dresses and they liked the mending I was doing.
It is common, now, to buy a garment, wear it four or five times and drop it off at a charity shop. This is called Fast Fashion and the cloth is poor and does not stand up to repeated washing. The garment is meant to become waste! Fast Fashion is cheap because it is made using child labour, slave labour or the profiteers simply pay starvation wages to the poor people hired to sew. Fast Fashion is evil. It is also wasteful and if you look around at your fellow Canadians, you will see very few of them who look well dressed at all. Wendy Pope said, “I have been feeling annoyed every time I go into a clothing shop. I want an alternative to Fast Fashion.”
One woman asked me what alternative to cotton cloth would be better and I had to say there is a production cost to every fabric. So we can’t simply abandon cotton for linen, silk or wool and continue to waste those resources. Polyester and other synthetic fabrics degrade over time leaving smaller and smaller pieces of toxic, synthetic material to get into the water supply and from there to poison tiny plankton in the oceans so they are not an option.
A solution to the wasteful practice of Fast Fashion is Slow Fashion. Slow Fashion means buying new clothes with the intention of keeping them for at least forty years, making sure they are well made from durable fabric, not washing them after every wear and doing more spot cleaning. Not washing so often makes cloth last a lot longer and the garment will keep its shape better. Our ancestors who had to wash clothes by hand were great ones for spot cleaning and airing garments.
Other Slow Fashion basics include buying good second hand clothes, shopping at Free Stores and the Free Shop on Northwest Road here on Denman. Mending, darning and lining the clothes that you have is kind of fun and makes the garment unique. You can create many pretty embroidered patterns with Sashiko-style mending.
If you would like to get together with other people for a fun and informative Mending Cafe, meet up at the United Church Hall on Wednesday 24 April from 2 to 4 pm. Bring a mending project but pick a simple one so it will be easy and fun for you. Bring scissors, thread, needles, pins, embroidery thread and cloth scraps. If you don’t have all that, come anyway as we will have extra supplies for beginners. If you have a large piece of cloth and would like to make a pillow case or a cushion cover, bring that too as Wendy will have her portable sewing machine there. There will be a big bag of clean wool to stuff cushions and pillows. Wool makes the very best pillows.
We will be making a big pot of ginger tea and bringing a GF fruit loaf to share. Feel free to bring treats. Admission is by donation.
