Welcome to Mending Small Holes, part of our Repair and Renew series of classes. These are a modern take on the Make Do & Mend movement guides that showed post-War Britain how to live sustainably. You will learn stitches and techniques to help you deal imaginatively with some of the more common repairs you’ll encounter. Rather than Make Do and Mend, this is more Mend and Make Better!

Mending Small Holes is the first of the Repair and Renew sessions. It lets you master techniques for small repairs in woven or knitted fabrics. Whatever the cause, snags, pulls and small holes need repairing quickly before they get larger and more problematic. So in this session you’ll learn stitches like blanket stitch and the tailor’s buttonhole stitch, and use them to explore scotch and blanket stitch darning. We’ll also look at more creative ways to deal with small holes and how to incorporate them into a larger design.

More in this series:

Rips/Tears and Reinforcing
In this class we look at a broad range of repairs from resolving a split seam to bringing two edges of a tear back together. We’ll look at using patches in a traditional and a more contemporary fashion to reenforce weak areas. And you’ll discover the amazing things that can be done with the fishbone stitch and the arrowhead tack.

Visible Darning
A new take on darning using colour and pattern to visibly darn large and small areas in knitted textiles. This is a stylised approach to darning, no invisible repairs in this class! You don’t need to be able to do traditional darning, just bring an open mind and some creativity.

Tutor Becky Davies-Downes is a fashion designer by training and costumer in the television industry for many years. She’s a specialist in 1940s fashion who takes a contemporary approach to the essential skills brought to the fore by the Make Do and Mend Movement that swept Britain in the War years. Re-discovering tips and tricks from the past and bringing them up to date for modern fabrics and designs is her forté. This is slow-crafting that’s for your pocket, good for your well-being and good for the environment.

Skill Level: no previous experience required.

Each participant receives a 10% off voucher to spend online or put towards another workshop.

Access notice: there are two flights of stairs to the workroom in our medieval building at 32 Coppergate, York YO1 9NR. We sincerely apologise if this prevents anyone attending.

You can book one at a time but if you book three classes in our Repair & Renew Series over the year, you’ll receive a £10 reward to spend online.

Terms and Conditions apply – please see here for details.