Mending – Rachel

For this mending assignment, I chose to mend my boyfriend’s old Stanford sweater that he wore a lot in high school. When he came to CMU, he ended up roughly tearing off the letters with an x-acto knife, and left holes and a ghost remnant of what used to be. I like how there now exists a lineage of alterations to this sweater with time and attitude.

I did a horizontal running stitch along where the word used to be, filling in a lot of small holes that were there. It made the sweater feel a lot sturdier than before. Then I did vertical ones to fill in letters to spell out “SAD,” as well as filling in some larger holes. It is actually quite hard to see what it spells out, unless you look for a long time. But I like that it is quite subtle.

However, I do regret doing such a large piece, that I was unable to experiment as much as, and ran out of time. I have started adding embroidery such as french knots and lazy daisies, but I will work more on this after!