Hosting your own mending party can be a fun way to motivate your community to shift to a repair mindset.
In 1830, the sewing machine was invented by a French tailor named Barthelemy Thimonnier. At the time, many people kept their own sheep or raised flax for spinning thread into cloth, or would save up to purchase cloth to sew their own clothing. Adding clothing to their wardrobe was a slow process, and many people owned just a few outfits at a time.
With the invention of the sewing machine during the industrial revolution, dressmaking shops that catered to the middle class emerged, making trendy clothing more accessible to a greater number of people. This led to an increased demand for clothing, and the beginning of clothing sweatshops. Sweatshops, factories that employ laborers over long hours in poor conditions for very low pay, have been a major part of the mass-produced clothing industry, and are still employed by some fast fashion brands today.
“Demand quality, not just in the products you buy, but in the life of the person who made it.” – Orsola de Castro, co-founder of Fashion Revolution, an activist movement working towards a sustainable fashion industry.
The fashion industry is one of the largest polluters on the planet, and over 100 billion items of clothing are produced each year. Textile production often pollutes local water supplies with toxins from the dyes, and microplastics are released into the environment from synthetic clothing production. Today purchasing fast fashion items from stores like T.J.Maxx and Walmart is the norm. Fast fashion clothing is made cheaply and with poor quality materials that wear out quickly. As these clothes wear out, we are left with piles of poor-quality items needing to be disposed of.
Donating clothing to thrift stores after we are done with it is much better than sending it directly to a landfill, but only about 25% of clothing donated actually gets to the sales floor of thrift stores. The other 75% is often shipped overseas, and much of it ends up in landfills or it is incinerated. Despite these numbers, thrift stores are still an important part of our efforts to reuse clothing and other items. But if we are all donating large quantities of items to thrift stores on a regular basis, they will simply not be able to handle all of what we donate.
As individuals we may not be able to completely change the fast fashion industry, but we can limit our participation by buying less clothing, and learning to mend what we have. Buying fewer items also means that we’re more likely to have the resources to purchase items made to last, and that lend themselves better to repairs.
Hosting your own mending party can be a fun way to motivate your community to shift to a repair mindset and to learn from each other or get help with your own project. On Saturday March 1st (1-3PM), Sustainable Woodstock and the Schoolhouse for Simple Living will be hosting a free Sewing Survival Skills workshop. Skilled volunteers from the Taftsville Chapel will be teaching us how to mend tears, attach buttons, and sew seams. There will be a sewing machine available as well if you would like expert advice on how to use one. Participants are welcome to bring along a mending project, and we will also be assembling sewing kits for communities in need. All skill levels are welcome, and this is also a good opportunity for older kids to learn the basics of mending.
We hope that you will join us for this fun community event, or host a mending party of your own! Taking the time to mend our clothes may seem like a small gesture, but it is a meaningful step towards a more sustainable future.
