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From NPR.
Arona Konaraj moved to Canada from Laos at age four with her family.
Her mother worked as a seamstress and spent a lot of her off time making clothes for Arona and her siblings.
They didn't have much money, and I.
Remember very vividly as a kid when she would mend the clothes, she would make them very invisible because there was like this sort of association with shame with wearing clothes that had holes and things were mended.
You know, kids would tease you because they would be like, you can't afford a new pair of jeans or something.
Today, Arona is a fiber artist with a huge following on social media and three books to her name, one on embroidery, another on punch needlework and a third on mending.
But it's not the kind of mending her mother did where you try to hide the repairs.
Instead, it's a style known as visible mending, where you use colorful threads, fabrics and decorative techniques to show off your.
Partly what has changed now is that it's become not just something that is practical and a means of fixing something, but a way of showing your creativity and also a way of expressing yourself.
I'm Ravenna Koenig, and I work as an editor in the NPR newsroom.
But in my free time, I've become a person who likes to express myself by mending my clothes.
Since I started a little over a year ago, I've patched my jeans with ornate embroidery.
I've woven light green and lavender patches over holes the size of golf balls in a chunky evergreen sweater.
I've used baby blue thread to stitch up runs in a gray and black striped wool base layer, and I've totally fallen in love with it.
The creativity, the repetition of hand sewing which takes me out of my head and into my hands, the rush of satisfaction I get every time I transform a holy garment into something I can wear again.
I'm not the only one visible.
Mending is having a moment, a flurry of how two books have been published in the last five years, and social media has become a hub for sharing mending ideas that emphasize artistic flow and noticeability.
You're adding to the look and the feel of your clothes as well as mending them at the same time.