Visible & creative mending 2026 – a six week course

Sorry – this course is now sold out! If you’d like to be put on a list to receive information about the next similar course, please email reception@brlsi.org. We also have a Practical Embroidery course starting in February – see here for details.

Add style and personal touches to your clothes by learning techniques to mend, renew and prolong the life of your favourite clothes!

Learn a wealth of fun and practical mending techniques to take home and put into action straight away. Extend the life of your favourite items and significantly reduce their environmental impact. Over the course of six weeks the course will cover three techniques each for knitted and woven fabrics.   Mending is the gift that keeps on giving!

Materials provided include: a swatch of knitted fabric, a selection of threads, a swatch of denim, a swatch of cotton, snips and threads, pins, darning profiles, embroidery hoops, felting needles, roving, felting mats.

To bring with you: latch hook (for fixing runs in knitwear), bent needle (for mending), sashiko needle, chenille needle, ball-tipped needle. OR buy a Kit add-on for £12.50 – see ticket details below (Kit will contain:  latch hook, bent tapestry needle, 2 darners, 1 chenille needle and a half decent threader!) .

What to expect:

Week 1 (8 January) – woven: Japanese sashiko & boro-inspired mending – perfect for patching denim, cotton or other woven textiles in beautiful geometric patterns inspired by the wabi sabi Sashiko tradition of Japan. This technique is both practical and decorative – using many small stitches to bond the patch to the worn fabric in patterns that will give your garment an elegant new look and a new lease of life.

Week 2 (15 January) – woven: embroidery – especially good for disguising stains or updating tired old clothes, embroidery could take up a whole course of its own! Working on a sampler on a hoop, we will go through a range of stitches and the ways they can be deployed to give your wardrobe an elegant new twist. 

Week 3 (22 January) – woven: applique & patches – working with a felt base we will felt and stitch a patch for covering over damage on either knitwear or weave. 

Week 4 (29 January) – knitted: English darning – the classic woven darn – an excellent all-rounder and the best place to start. Can be used to mend knitted or woven fabrics of all weights, neatly or more organically to your personal taste. if you’re mending a hole, you need to replace the missing stitches – sewing the sides together will just create a puckered, scruffy, unsatisfactory surface. English darning is the fastest way to do that and you can have fun with colours and patterns with micro-weaves, but be aware that weaving on knitwear will by definition always stand out as a bit different. Make a feature of it! 

Week 5 (5 February) – knitted: reverse darning – a build on classic English darning, reverse darning does what it says on the tin. Working from the back, this is one of the most durable mends for knitwear, as the warp and weft are secured through the backs of the stitches around and all the way up to the edges of the damage. 

Week 6 (12 February) – knitted: Swiss darning – the holy grail of knitwear mending; done well, Swiss darning can render even quite extensive damage invisible. Following the journey of the original thread through the knit, we retrace the steps of where it would have been to reinforce and rebuild the fabric in seemingly “knitted” stitches that behave – and look – exactly as the originals.

The course starts on Thursday 8 January at 7pm and runs for two hours a week across six weeks.

If you’d like to join BRLSI and secure your place at the member-rate, (along with reduced rate tickets for all our talks, plus other local offers such as 15% off at the Francis Hotel’s restaurant), please go to our membership page here!