My niece gave me this pair of hand knit mittens for Christmas a few years ago. I often wear them to walk the dogs.

I use a two hand hold on dog leads. The right hand holds the lead with the handle loop over my right right thumb. The left hand holds the lead on the side that is attached to the dog. It allows me a very secure hold and allows me to steer the dog, to bring her closer to be or let her have more length. As a result, the lead slides along the palm of the left mitten a lot.

With time, the yarn on the left palm was getting thin. And even worse, the mitten was getting drafty!

For this repair I referenced Visible Mending by Jenny Wilding Cardon and Tom van Deijnen’s great mending blog, tomofholland .

I used a basic woven darn. I used plain green worsted wool yarn which I knew would felt from the heat of my hands as I wear the mitten. In fact, after just a few days, the repair is already starting to settle and felt into the brown wool of the mitten!

I stitched an vertical in-and-out on the “ladders” between the rows. After doing that in all the threadbare areas, I wove in and out across horizontally across the rows. It was a bit tricky—the horizontal green yarn kept sliding under the larger brown yarn. As a result, my darning isn’t perfectly woven, but it has turned out to be just fine.

This project wraps up my mending month of February! I had a lot of fun learning more about mending and am happy to have repaired a pair of pants, a mitten and a quilt!

And that’s not all! At the Proper Bostonian Quilt Guild meeting the day before Valentine’s Day, we had a hands-on workshop on Japanese Boro mending which uses multiple layers of patches with sashiko stitching. We were told there was going to be a Valentine workshop but not what we where going to be doing. So I was delighted to find out it was another take on what I’d been doing all month!

Here is my Boro Valentine. All supplies, including the hand-painted wood frame, were supplied by the woman running the workshop. Pretty sweet!!

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