Mending—Facing What Is and Doing the Work

Nicole Nehrig, clinical psychologist, maker, and author of the newly released With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories, reflects on a personal experience that reveals the healing and transformative power of mending.

Beginning to Mend

Contending with the many challenges of the past several years—a global pandemic, political upheaval, devastating wars, deepening social and economic inequities—exposes just how difficult it is to avoid succumbing to feelings of helplessness, denial, or blinding rage, none of which enable us to cope or fight back in particularly useful ways. Working through a personal loss during this time provided a tangible, approachable model for facing these more daunting problems.

In January of 2022, just as I thought some normalcy might be returning after the pandemic, I had a fire in my home that displaced my family for 15 months. I put dozens of my handknitted sweaters and shawls into storage, and when I moved back home and unpacked the boxes I found they were terribly moth-eaten. Overwhelmed by the enormity of the loss, I could not imagine fixing them. Many seemed beyond repair. I threw a few of the most damaged ones out in my initial despair, salvaging buttons or a sleeves-worth of yarn when possible. I had never mended knitted garments before, and amid the stress of moving and writing a book, I could not take on learning how. I washed them all, sorrowfully watching the garments disintegrate further in the water, and put them in airtight storage bags in a closet. For nearly two years I avoided dealing with the damage—I just couldn’t face it. But I missed my handknits. They form a substantial part of my wardrobe and are an expression of myself, reflecting the work of my mind and my hands.

One of Nicole’s sweaters before and after mending.

In January of 2025, I finally felt ready to pull them out of the closet and see if I could find a way forward. To repair something, you have to accept the damage. You must be really honest about what is wrong to figure out how to fix it. It’s only when you understand the parameters of the problem that you can solve it. I knew it would not be healthy for me to spend more time mentally resisting what is—I needed to accept reality and do the work to actually try to fix it.

The “Magic Power” of the Needle

Luckily, I had saved the leftover yarn for most of the sweaters, so I could do (nearly) invisible repairs. I followed tutorials by the brilliant mender Alexandra Brink. Once I got the hang of it, the needle was like an eraser removing the unwanted holes. I recalled the quote by Louise Bourgeois, who grew up watching her mother repair eighteenth and nineteenth century tapestries: “I’ve always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair the damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it’s not a pin.”

There were a few sweaters that I did not have yarn for. I remembered playing yarn chicken with these projects and ending up with only a few inches left. I had to do some creative problem-solving to mend them in a way that I would enjoy wearing. In my research on women’s textile arts, I had interviewed Flora Collingwood-Norris, who specializes in creative visible mending. Comparing her knitwear design process to her mending work, she said, “I quite enjoy the challenge of working with what’s there. You never get to choose the placement of the holes or the size of them . . . You’ve always got some restrictions, and in a way I think that makes it much easier to be creative because you can’t just do anything . . . You’ve already got a sweater and it’s already got holes in it, so you’re working with what you’ve got, and I think those restrictions are really great.” I took one of her online classes and fixed a large hole on a sleeve with a woven pattern that is reminiscent of elbow patches on a tweed jacket.

Nicole Nehrig’s sweater in the mending process.

Another repair was inspired by Judit Gummlich, who does beautiful embroidery on knitwear. While I had used all of the main color of yarn for a sweater, I had leftovers of the contrast colors. I repaired the hole and then embroidered flowers using the contrast colors to cover the repair. I was surprised to find that I like these sweaters even more now than I did before the damage. Things often don’t stay the same, and there can be beauty in imperfection and impermanence. Rather than trying to hide the hole and pretend it never happened, a visible mend is honest about the damage and transforms it into something new and beautiful.

Employing the Mind, Hand, and Heart

In my book, With Her Own Hands, I wrote, “To repair is to acknowledge and respond to the fragility of our world in a productive way, not by simply throwing our hands up in despair after the damage, but by employing the skills of the mind, hand, and heart to mend an earlier moment in history.” Only once I accepted the damage could I make my sweaters functional again. We create space for possibility if we let go of the way things should be and see them for what they really are. Accepting that we live within oppressive, painful, unfair systems doesn’t mean we condone them or that we throw up our hands and do nothing—rather it brings us to the point where we can find solutions and live with meaning and purpose within these systems as we fight to change them. If we really look at what is broken, then we can engage in creative problem-solving to figure out how to fix it. In doing so, we ultimately find that there is always some measure of freedom within constraints. Mending my handknits gave me hope that other things in our world that seem irreparably damaged may also be mended if we can let go of what should be, face the problem, and do the work.

Learn more about how Nicole’s twin passions for craft and women’s lives illuminate the shared story of women’s handwork in an interview with Long Thread Podcast host Anne Merrow.

And learn more about Nicole Nehrig’s new book: With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories