Where better to teach a Mend your Knitting class, than an excellent new local yarn shop? A Wing and A Bear is tucked away behind the Market Place in Durham, on Fowlers Yard and is well worth a visit, if you’re interested in knitting, crochet, spinning or natural dyeing. I was delighted when the owners invited me to come and teach a mending workshop there.
Seven of us spend a Saturday afternoon together learning different ways of darning knitted fabrics (hand or machine knitted). We talked about some general principles of good mending and about some specific items people were hoping to mend. We also chatted about the mysterious way unfinished projected accumulate in the corners of our houses, the problem of moths and the way our stashes of yarn continue to grow, despite our attempts to knit our way through them. Much tea was drunk and we laughed quite a lot too.
If you’ve got much loved pieces of knitting that are starting to show their age and you’d love to keep them usable for longer, it’s amazing what some simple mending skills can make possible. Keep an eye out on my Facebook, Instagram and Bluesky accounts for future workshops, or, if you’re near Durham, the Wing and a Bear website.
Ragbag Mending 