Mending – Kevin Thies

The object I chose to mend was my favorite jacket. It’s a jacket that’s been with me for a long time, and has a lot of memories attached to it. I must’ve gotten it around 2012, after participating in a film shoot for Revolution, where all the extras were dressed in similar Converse clothes, but in black, and afterwards my mom went out and bought a jacket in green, and days after that they ran out of stock. I imagine it was because the show bought a bunch up for the wardrobe department. I wore it almost every day in high school, so much so that I wore down the jacket enough to warrant buying a new one that looked similar, and I had that long enough to wear it down even further than the original, so I went back to wearing this one and only ended up wearing it down more. I didn’t wear it much in college because it had gotten really threadbare around the arms. The blue paint is from when I painted the fence for Donner during Orientation.

I’d already put some work into this jacket, stitching up a tear rather haphazardly, attaching leather patches to the elbows after that area had fallen completely to shambles, and I decided to swap the buttons on the cuffs and shoulders for flair. The buttons originally looked like the ones you see on the pockets.

The first thing I did was fix up the area under the patch seen above with some stylized darning. I added the warp using a full piece of embroidery floss, and decided that instead of doing a full weft, I’d just do something a little more decorative like stripes. I also reinforced the edge of the fabric with another bit of darning, this time with both a warp and weft.

The other repair I did was to reinforce the old stitch job I did. I really liked the herringbone stitch, and found that if you first did two stitches spaced apart out of a darker floss, and then a third in between them with a lighter floss, it would really pop.

All in all it was nostalgic working on such a loved piece of clothing, and the repairs are aesthetically pleasing while not compromising utility. I’m glad that I did some prototyping with the herringbone pattern and that it turned out really well, and the thick floss repairs give it a bit of a scrappy, hand-done look that I enjoy. I’ll have to keep repairing this jacket through the years in a similar way so that the scrappiness can spread.