Making Repair Visible, Making Repair Beautiful
Interviewing Grace Russo on sustainability and stewardship
I got to talk to MaryRose Depperschmidt’s “The Crab and the Cross” podcast about the Barbie movie and how children play. Next week, I’ll be sharing my favorite books I read this year (and I’ve got three books left on my to-read list for 2023, so we’ll see how this goes).
When Plough announced an issue themed around repair, I immediately pitched an interview with homemaker Grace Russo. I first “met” her on twitter, and followed her home sewing repairs, and later met her in real life (we hired her to write our garden plan).
My own repair style is heavily influenced by the time I spent working construction on stage crew, a spirit of Oh god it needs to be fixed during intermission, at least the audience can’t see the back. And, to be honest, it’s a pretty fun spirit of repair.
(I will always remember the time in college I checked with the costume shop manager on whether I needed to change out my bobbin thread for every post-apocalyptic cultist robe I was sewing, “Nah, there’s a thread shortage after the bombs, they make do”).
But Grace’s work is informed by the Japanese practice of sashiko, which neither tries to make repairs invisible nor is focused on function to the point of ignoring appearance. The repaired garment wears its mending as a visible ornament.
As I wrote for Plough, the habit of mending changed what Grace bought:
When Russo began repairing her clothes, it changed what kinds of new clothes she wanted to buy. When she looked at something on the rack or at a thrift store, she didn’t just consider how the outfit looked then, but how it would change as it aged and weakened. What kind of mending would it need and what kind of repairs could it support?
She looked for thicker cotton fabrics that could stand up to strong stitches. She avoided clothes made of stretchier synthetic fabrics – she didn’t like the idea of wearing petroleum products, but more than that, they didn’t take repairs gracefully. She even wound up checking online reviews of clothes to see what kind of seam was hidden inside a dress before ordering it. A straight stitch in a stretchy maternity outfit was much more likely to rip than a zigzag.
As she looked at each seam, imagining how she might one day pass it back through a machine, she had a stronger sense of the hands that had already guided it, inch by inch, into its present form. Until she took up sewing herself, Russo imagined that a lot of clothes manufacturing was automated in the ways spinning thread had been. But there are almost no sewing machines that work alone. The needle is pumped up and down by a motor, but human hands guide the cloth around its turns. There is nothing woven that we put on our bodies that hasn’t passed through someone’s hands, usually half a world away.
In the back half of the piece, I got to talk to Grace about she carries over her repair sensibility into her work as a master gardener:
Repairing the ecosystem, whether at the scale of a yard or a neighborhood, is slower work than darning a sock. At the house where Russo lives, there are non-native plants she and her husband ripped out immediately, and others that were so deeply rooted that she decided to live with them. A Norway maple is invasive, but “if you move into a house with a thirty-year-old maple, it doesn’t make sense to chop it down and put in a three-year-old sapling.” Instead, she looked up shade shrubs that were natives and would welcome the protection of its branches.
When a sleeve of her gardening clothes rips on a thorn, the mending won’t make it look like nothing happened. And when homeowners and city planners have worked against the grain of the earth for generations, “we’re at a point with our ecosystem where it’s never going to look like nothing happened.”
In your own life, I’m curious about your experiences of repair:
When I was just a little girl, I accidentally knocked a vase over and broke it that Mom had bought on her honeymoon. Mom was upset and angry of course because I had been careless. So I deliberately sat down and glued every single piece of that vase back together and gave it back to Mom. She said she would treasure it even more now because I had worked so hard to fix it.
Because my husband is in the Army, we frequently move and must ask the question "Am I OK if this is broken/damaged?" when we buy something. Almost all our furniture is used furniture from Facebook Marketplace, including a couch that, after our move from Alaska to Oklahoma, has a broken leg and a tear in the fabric covering its back. There's a physics textbook where the leg used to be, and because the couch sits against a wall, none of its problems are visible. We've seen that damaged things still serve their function (i.e., the couch is just for sitting, not to complete the aesthetic of the living room), so on our long list of concerns every time we move, our used, already-damaged furniture isn't one of them.