School in Denver:



I’m not the best seamstress, but during my years parenting young kids, I did keep the needle and thread handy, not wanting to toss out clothes just because there was a small tear, or a button missing. Repairing a tear like a knife cut is relatively easy: you just sew the two sides together. But holes in the fabric can be more challenging because you have some missing material. Sometimes a patch does the job. Another technique (darning) is to take the thread and needle in a very relaxed way, and sew back and forth, from side to side, as though the needle were meeting the different numbers on a round clock face. So you take the needle, say, from one to seven to eleven to five to ten to four. You don’t tighten up the thread too much because it will get into an unappealing scrunch. Instead, you make a stitch with a gentle run of the needle from two to eight, and up to twelve, and another, and another and at some point the hole is sealed and healed. The crisscrossing of the threads across the gap creates new fabric of its own.