Mending Life: A Handbook for Repairing Clothes and Hearts by Nina and Sonya Montenegro is a charming and useful little book on a wide range of needlecraft techniques to mend damaged clothing items. Her clear, concise explanations of techniques like patching, darning, and sashiko. This book is great for anyone rethinking fast fashion and the unsustainable disposability of contemporary clothing

The Montenegros presumes no sewing expertise whatsoever on the part of the reader. She literally describes and diagrams how to thread a needle, several ways to knot the thread, and several useful stitches for mending both wovens and knits. She includes a list of mending tools you'll need if you decide to take up the "mending life" seriously--darning eggs, glove darners, etc.--but she also discusses ways to work around not having those specialized items.

Interspersed among the practical techniques/diagrams are sweet, peaceful illustrations of stitchers mending various garments and philosophical musings on how positive the act of mending garments can be on one's psyche. This book has no new information for an experienced sewist in terms of the how of mending/darning/patching, but even a seasoned seamster/mender may find something new and uplifting in the introspective portions.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

As a long-time seamstress, this book does an excellent job of taking the task of mending (and basic sewing) and breaking it down into easy-to-follow steps. These steps are supplemented with illustrations for those who are more visually inclined. While the book is about mending clothing and accessories, it's also an allegory for mending the relationships and past hurts in your own life. Depending on the age of the reader, they may or may not get the deeper meaning, but it would still be a worthwhile read for the life skills aspect.

Great overview on mending. Nice instruct;ions on how to mend with various stitches. Illustrations are very clear and concise. This will be a useful tool for many people.

"Mending Life' is a perfect book for our times. We need to focus more on mending our clothes instead of throwing them away and buying new ones. But for that we need pretty good skills of mending so that our clothes could still look nice and serve us longer. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who wants to lead a conscious lifestyle. I loved the intro in which we can read that our clothes are like our memories, they are part of our identity, every hole is a different story. I think people have forgotten about that completely, it's high time they realised that old clothes can still be useful and that it's the only way in which fashion can help our planet.