An alarming number of tons of textiles end up in landfills each year. That includes blankets, shoes, clothes, curtains, towels, and other fabric items In 2018, the EPA estimated that 17 million tons of textiles ended up in the trash.

The U.S. has 542 operational landfills. In seven states, landfills are nearing their capacity. Reducing trash is reaching urgency in some areas. Keeping textiles from landfills needs to trend, and visible mending is one approach that helps.

Take Vermont for example. The state’s 647,464 residents share one landfill. The landfill in the small town of Coventry recently raised alarms and there’s only space for about 20 more years of trash. Back-to-back years of flooding led to debris from the destruction led to problems with higher levels of debris that led to high levels of sulfur dioxide. The levels were high enough to fail the air quality standards laid out in the state permit.

Major storms aren’t decreasing, so it’s hard to limit the trash coming in from a storm’s destruction. Instead, people can reuse or donate rather than throw away. RecycleNation knows that visible mending offers a fashionable way to breathe new life into clothes with holes, rips, or other damage.

What Is Visible Mending?

Visible mending is a project where you repair damage to a piece of clothing using patches or embroidery. The idea is to make the repair stand out rather than try to hide the damage. Use creativity and color to bring new life to old things.

Suppose your favorite cardigan has a hole starting on the cuff. Instead of trying to sew the hole closed, you might use embroidery floss to turn that hole into part of the galaxy. You could use patches on torn jeans, but make the patches into something artistic using colorful floss and visible stitches. 

Visible mending helps fix every textile item and clothing piece you could imagine. You have a hole starting in your sofa. You could cover that hole with appliques for a colorful addition to your existing fabric. Fix jackets, tears in fabric sneakers, or burns in placemats.

Recycling clothing is catching on in the fashion industry. Australia’s Romance Was Born takes unwanted clothing and turns pieces into one-of-a-kind fashions. 

Build Your Visible Mending Tool Kit

What do you need to get started? Very little is necessary to have a comprehensive visible mending tool kit. You want a set of needles for sewing, darning, and embroidery. You need pins and a pin cushion or container. 

Pinking shears that cut fabric in zigzags to prevent fraying are helpful. You also want a ruler and chalk or fabric pen for marking fabric. Purchase a variety of sewing threads. A thinner thread works well for some projects, but a thicker thread will stand up to areas that cover moveable joints, like your knee or elbow.

Turn excess fabric into patches of different sizes. An embroidery hoop is useful for embroidering over holes or tears. You might want to embroider designs on your patches, too. You also want to have embroidery floss and yarn for these embroidered designs and add patches using a blanket stitch.

If you have a sewing machine, it may help you with some of your patchwork. You don’t need one to complete visible mending projects. Don’t feel that you must purchase a sewing machine. It’s unnecessary.

The Best Stitches and Techniques for Visible Mending

After purchasing a variety of threads and needles, gather your clothes and patches. Different stitches help you present your artistic side. These are the best stitches for visible mending.

Applique

Appliques are layers of fabrics and patches to cover holes and tears. You use different colors and shapes to make patterns. There’s another process called reverse applique that’s similar only the patches work in reverse so that the larger patch sits over a smaller patch and holes in each patch create the visible layers.

Blanket Stitch

A blanket stitch is one of the easiest stitches, and it helps join two pieces of fabric in a strong stitch. While you push the needle through the fabric, you’re looping the thread from the previous thread under the needle. This forms a stitch that resembles the number 7. A line of blanket stitches forms a continuous pattern that looks like side-by-side Ts.

Boro

Several of the best stitches for visible mending are Japanese embroidery techniques. Boro uses straight stitches as you join patches to form patterns.

Dots

Wrap your embroidery floss around a needle several times before you push the needle through the fabric. A small dot remains. These are great for filling in the center of flowers while giving them texture.

Sashiko

This is a form of Japanese embroidery that focuses on running stitches. This means one stitch starts where the last stitch ends. It forms straight lines with durable, dashed stitches. Use those lines to create curved or straight patterns on your textiles.

Straight Stitch

There’s very little to a straight stitch. You’re simply putting the needle through the fabric to create a small straight line of thread. You can take this basic stitch and place them close together to form patterns.

Visible Darning

Because socks are made from yarn, you repair them with strands of yarn. This process is called darning. In visible darning, you use yarn to close rips or holes. You want a brightly colored yarn that stands out.

Tips for Recycling Unneeded Clothes and Textiles

What do you do if you can’t turn everything you have into something new? Start by hitting up local forums to see if anyone could use them. Many quilters take old clothes to make squares for quilting. If clothes are in decent shape, there are always people looking for used clothing.

You can donate clothing to secondhand stores or non-profits like Goodwill. You may find deposit boxes in your area where clothing donations go to people in need. What’s most important is that you don’t throw things out.

When you recycle and reuse instead of throwing things into the trash, you keep microplastics, metals, and other plastic materials from sitting in the ground for decades or centuries. Landfills have more room for items that cannot be reused or recycled. It helps the environment, you, and future generations.

Use Recycle Nation’s recycling tool to find where to go with your textiles. Choose Textiles in the search bar and enter your ZIP code; it’s that easy.