Erika Moen

Have you ever been putting on an item of clothing and heard it go RRRRRRRRRRIPPPPPPP like a freaking cartoon sound effect? That happened to me recently with my (I guess very old??) jean jacket. Fortunately, I am a sewer!! ...No, not the very important infrastructure that conveys sewage >:c I AM A BI

Here's a few things I've mended recently! My shoe that I got at Goodwill and only wore a handful of times before it started to do this: Those little strappy-bandy bits were coming off, so I glued 'em the fuck down! About once a month I do volunteer mending over at Repair PDX, which is where people j

Our windshield sun shade-thing is broken. We've been using these two window covers for, like, a decade? Um, do I need to explain this design? Here, I don't think this is the same brand or model that we have, but this is basically the same thing as ours. It's these two panels that each fill up half t

Ok, I'm about to be offline for the next week in Alaska! I have literally twenty minutes until my ride to the airport comes to pick me up so here is a VERY FAST and unaesthetic post about my bike bag mend! The Damage I am a several-days-a-week bike commuter! Not quite every day, but from 1-5 days a

Listen, I made a whole tiny (1 minute long) video about this which Patreon won't let me embed here but you can go watch it on my Instagram: Matt and I inherited this wagon from our neighbors. Obviously, it is past its prime, but it still technically rolled so I got some use out of it. Now, though, t

My friend Ben Coleman has a jacket that he wore daily for ten years. It served him well! But you wear something that much for a decade and it's just a matter of time before it accrues some battle damage. You guys already know where this is going. Yeah. I mended the fuck outta this coat. Coleman is a

Sometime around 2010ish, Matt and I bought our most expensive piece of furniture- a brand new couch from Ikea. This noble steed has served us well. In addition to normal couch duties, she's also served as a guest bed to many a visitor over the years, as well as an impenetrable fortress when cats nee

Once a week, my French Mother-in-Law (Ma belle-mere) helps me practice my second language over a video call. She's offered for years- the entire 19 years I've been with her son!- but I was always too embarrassed of my caveman-level language skills. I love French. I love the way it sounds. I love the

I wear my clothing till it literally falls apart. Case in point, my bee socks that I've had for easily over a decade. I think they may have actually been a gift from someone? Maybe I bought them? Whoever paid, I definitely squeezed every last drop of dollar value out of 'em before retiring them to t

Some years ago I bought some cheap boots on sale at my grocery store. They were either $40 or $20, I can't remember. They served me well but they were not made to last, so inevitably the interiors began disintegrating- which was fine, I could still wear them! Nobody but me knew that the insides look

My excitement at successfully registering for one of Repair PDX's very popular and very difficult-to-get-a-spot-in Kintsugi repair classes was short-lived when the directions instructed me to bring in a broken ceramic to work on and I realized that, for once, I don't actually have any at the moment.

You wear your favorite jeans until they are shreds. Your body rubs away denim, fiber by fiber, until the light shines through them. It takes years, but all through the power of your body moving and living in these jeans, rubbing against them every day, grinding them away from the inside, you wear ri

"You're the only person I know who would bring an entire CURTAIN to a hot springs." -Matt, after asking me what entertainment I was going to bring on our weekend retreat two hours away in the woods. When we moved in to our house ten years ago, the previous tenants left two long brown curtains up in

Sometime after I moved to Portland, I bought my first sleeping bag. Considering that that was 17 years ago, this guy has held up really well! But time comes for us all and the case-thing that keeps it wrapped up tight has developed two spectacular tears with frayed edges that are large enough that t

Matt is an avid climber (indoor bouldering, specifically). Even though he's invested in pants specially made for the activity, he climbs so zealously that he regularly reduces them into scraps. After some small mending jobs, his pants were getting so threadbare that just attaching new patches would