PROGRAM DETAILS:
Date Saturday, January 31, 2026
Time 1-4 PM
Location NUMU | 106 E. Main Street, Los Gatos, CA, 95030
Cost $95 General, $75 NUMU Members. Become a member today!
Join book and fiber artist Jody Alexander (on view in Stitches & Wiggles: Unraveled and Reimagined Mixed Media Art by Jody Alexander and Thomas Campbell) at NUMU for an afternoon of learning all things mending. In this 3-hour workshop, the artist will teach a variety of mending techniques. Mending techniques are used to repair and strengthen garments and other textile items. But, when left visible, the repairs are also decorative and add texture, line, color, and can be quite charming! The techniques can also be used in paper and textile art pieces.
In this workshop, students will create a sampler of mending techniques seen in Japanese and French textiles. After learning the techniques, attendees will proceed to repair or embellish a garment or other textile item of their choice. Some materials will be provided, but each student will bring an item that needs repair, or embellishing and will apply one or more of the mending techniques learned in the class.
The instructor will bring items from her collection of mended textiles for inspiration. Students should bring a textile item that has a worn area that needs reinforcing, a hole or tear that requires repair, a stain that needs covering, or an item that simply could use some stitcherly embellishment. This can be a pair of pants, a dress, a shirt or skirt, a tablecloth, a curtain, or other textile item.
Students should bring the following:
Threads you may want to work with: embroidery, machine thread, sashiko, pearl cotton, etc.
Scraps of fabric to use as patches
An item to repair or embellish
Needles to fit your threads
Pins
Scissors
Thread snips (optional)
The instructor will provide:
Fabric for sampler
Fabric scraps for patching
Threads
About Jody Alexander
Website
Jody Alexander is a book, fiber, and mixed media artist who includes textiles, objects, wall pieces, garments, and installations in her art practice. Her work is inspired by the art of repair, reuse, and by the imagery and stories encountered in her travels on the ground and in the water.
Alexander is fascinated with water. She swam competitively between the ages of eleven and twenty-one, and was on the U.S. National Team in 1979, qualified for the 1980 Olympic Trials (which were canceled due to the U.S. pulling out of the Olympics), and swam on scholarship for UCLA.
When the pools closed in the spring of 2020, Alexander turned to the ocean and lakes to continue her daily swims.
Her latest project, “Aqua Lab: In Search of the Third Thing,” is an investigation to understand her attraction to water. “Is it,” she asks, “the weightlessness, solitude, color, patterns of light, sound, adventure, or the thrill of the unknown?”
