Mending clothes uses a set of very traditional skills that have largely gone out of favour in the last few decades. In this session, Claire will tell the story of how simple and seemingly mundane acts such as patching jeans and darning socks have helped her to see God with fresh eyes, and to find hope when things seemed dark.

Visible mending is a modern creative twist on traditional mending, making a creative feature out of repairs, rather than treating them as something to be hidden away discretely. (You could think of it as a fabric parallel to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, repairing pottery with gold) With fast fashion making clothing increasingly cheap and disposable, visible repair can be a revolutionary act. We’ll spend some time in this session thinking about how this creative practice can change our relationship with our clothes, with ourselves and with our environment. Is it possible to have a spirituality of mending?

You can find examples of Claire’s mending on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter by searching for @ragbagmending