Playful Mending with Hikaru Noguchi,
Lora Avedian, and Nina and Sonya Montenegro
January 30, 31 & February 1, 2026
Online
Up to 90 Students
No Experience Necessary
The heart of this online retreat explores the unique and nourishing ways we mend our beloved belongings and engage in the art of play.
Mending encourages us to repair rather than give away and invites our hands to weave stories into what we already own. A well-worn garment hints at how we move through a day, a year, a season of our life, and beckons us to embrace these moments through thoughtful, and often playful, means of mending something we love. We mend as an act of restoring and to add a personal unique mark, healing not only a physical item but our hearts too, sometimes without even knowing it. From different parts of the world, Hikaru Noguchi, Lora Avedian, and the Far Woods sisters Nina and Sonya Montenegro, will share their favorite facets of mending. We’ll darn our socks, extend the life of our clothes by using decorative embroidered motifs to cover up stains or rips, and carve a stamp to print on a patch that can be used for all kinds of repair. We’ll have options to mend for real or create a sampler, depending on the items brought to class and each individual’s comfort level.
At the end of Day One, we’ll be guided by certified yoga instructor Caitlin Rose Kenney in a gentle body movement session, and for the last half hour on Day Three, we’ll host a special presentation about mending in community. We’ll share a conversation about all the beautiful ways to share mending out into the world; talk about repair cafes and mending pop ups; mending circles and mending with children; how we can share the art of repair in public, and more. We can’t wait to take you on a journey through the wonderful ways to create a culture of repair that extends beyond our own homes.
A Care Kit will be mailed to you with special materials for this workshop experience, along with a small list of basic additional items for you to provide. The retreat recording will be available for three months with unlimited access for continued learning. New this year! We’ll host a post-retreat unstructured working session alongside our teacher team to answer additional questions and share works in progress.
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Three different, unique workshops taught by different teachers from around the world
Carefully curated Care Kit by our teacher team mailed to your home
Community Conversation about mending in community lead by the Far Woods sisters Nina & Sonya
Gentle body movement session
Unlimited access to the retreat recording for three months
Extra one hour post-retreat working session with our teacher team
Experience it all from the comfort of your own home
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Darning Socks with Innovative Repair Techniques with Hikaru Noguchi
Sock Darning is a little bit different than other darning. It requires strength, stretchiness, and comfort. I have been developing the most comfortable and easy sock darning methods for years and during this workshop, I will share my innovative repair techniques using tights fabric as a support to stitch the damage. We’ll talk about suitable threads for sock mending, use stretchy fabric as a support patch, and practice both round and parallel honeycomb stitching as a means of decorative repair.
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Fixing Clothes with Decorative Hand Embroidery with Lora Avedian
Discover how to extend the life of our clothes by using decorative embroidered motifs to cover up stains or rips in a fun and functional way. Lora will start by touching on a variety of embroidery stitches which can be adapted to different designs, with each motif relating to the theme of nature that Lora works with in her practice, and ultimately focusing on three core ones - darning, couching, and fly. We’ll talk about different styles of visible mending; explore how we can use upcycled and unusual materials for embroidery; learn how to draw our designs onto material; and discover how to make our work last, giving our clothes a new lease on life and creating a truly unique garment.
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Playful Block Printed Patches with Nina and Sonya Montenegro
Nina and Sonya have always seen mending less as labor and more as an opportunity to play. When a garment springs a hole it’s a chance to experiment– in technique, material, and color-- and to have fun! Mending invites us into a world where imperfection is allowable and even embraced. The stakes are low, the pressure is off (there’s already a hole so what is there to lose in trying to fix it?) — the playful muse feels welcome to appear. Adding our personal touch, we can infuse a garment with uniqueness, dynamism, and lightheartedness.
Best known for their iconic print work celebrating the natural world and Mending Life, their illustrated book of mending tutorials, Sonya and Nina will bring their passion for these two art forms together on Day Three for Playful Block Printed Patches. They will share how to carve and print two original designs onto four colorful fabric patches, and demonstrate how to adhere (sew) the patch onto a garment, jacket, tote bag, or backpack.
About the Artist | Hikaru Noguchi
Hikaru Noguchi has been a leading knitted fabric designer since the early 1990s. Having lived and worked in the UK and South Africa, her work is influenced by British traditional knit patterns and craft techniques, and by South African natural fibres and landscapes. She works with small knit workshops in Scotland, Japan and the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, where attention to detail and quality are still valued, seeking a look that is sophisticated and quirky, achieved through unusual juxtapositions of colour and texture. During the last twelve years she has added traditional darning and mending techniques to her work, aiming to promote new concepts in textiles and garments.
Author of:
Darning Repair Make Mend
Creative Mending
Beyond Daring
hikarunoguchishop.com
@hikaru_noguchi_design
About the Artist | Lora Avedian
Lora Avedian’s work sits at the intersection of textile design and art, encompassing everything from large-scale installations at venues like Barbican Centre and the Chelsea Flower Show to exquisite, embroidered linens and soft furnishings that are sought after by the world’s best interior designers. All of Lora’s work is invested with her own deeply-held values: a passion for craft and traditional techniques, a dedication to making in small batches and in the UK, and a wide-ranging imagination and love of nature. All of these values come together to create beautiful ‘modern artefacts’, heirloom pieces that can be loved for generations.
Learning and scholarship is vitally important to Lora: her training has been a journey of exploration through the possibilities of textiles from a BA in embroidery to a Masters in Mixed Media Textiles from the Royal College of Art, with a stint along the way working in set design, which lent a sense of scale and ambition to her projects. Lora is an Associate lecturer on BA and MA Textiles at London College of Fashion in the UK and also runs workshops both independently and for organizations such as Royal Academy of Arts, Atelier Clos Mirabel and Selvedge Magazine.
Author of:
About the Artists | Nina & Sonya
Sisters Nina and Sonya Montenegro are menders, printmakers, illustrators, and mothers who have been collaborating as The Far Woods Creative Studio since 2013. Together they wrote and illustrated Mending Life: A Handbook for Repairing Clothes and Hearts which combines mending tutorials with rich illustrations and a spirit of repair. They are currently based in the Midwest.
Author of:
Mending Life: Handbook for Repairing Clothes and Hearts
thefarwoods.com
etsy.com/thefarwoods
@thefarwoods
Online Retreat Schedule
Friday, January 30th
9am to 12:15pm mst
Saturday, January 31st
9am to 12pm mst
Sunday, February 1st
9am to 12:30pm mst
Retreat Experience Pricing
$315 US / $345 International
includes
3 workshop days
(9 total hours of instruction)
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4 teachers from around the world
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curated care kit mailed to your home (shipping included)
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gentle movement session
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3 months unlimited recordings
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1 post-retreat community working session
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online class page with details and inspiration about this retreat
Questions? See our FAQs. We’re happy to work with you on a custom payment plan; email ali@themakerie.com.