For This Post,

I am staying in Japan,

and looking at a dying craft, that of invisible mending, Kaketsugi as it is known in Japan, it is a fact that we live in a throwaway age, but sometimes there is a item of clothing that we want to keep and just have to have it mended,

a few years back, a news report on kaketsugi by South Korean TV station SBS went viral. It focused on the work of Japanese craftsman Takao Matsumoto, who had been using the technique to restore clothing for over 55 years. Although Matsumoto isn’t the only one versed in the art of kaketsugi – Japan’s NHK station featured father-daughter team, Kataoka Tesshu and Goto Yoshiko, 

Kaketsugi is a painstaking process that begins with removing a small piece of cloth from inside the garment, where its absence will not be noticed. This piece is then brushed with an acetone-based solution that makes the removal of individual threads a bit easier, stripping the piece of cloth down to individual threads is probably the most painstaking part of kaketsugi, but masters of this craft claim that using the exact same fabric as the one the garment is made of is essential to making the mending truly invisible at the end,

the newly-obtained threads are then carefully sewn over the hole or damaged area of the garment, from multiple directions, and from both sides of the cloth. Once the sewing process is complete, an adhesive bond is applied over the repaired area, and the leftover threads are used to mask the damage even more, finally, the area repaired with kaketsugi is ironed out. That helps smooth everything out and at this point, it’s almost impossible to see where the hole was in the first place, and the cost of invisible mending? according to the website of Kimono Totonoe, a company that claims to employ kaketsugi masters, prices for repairs start at $136+shipping for holes of up to 0.5cm in diameter and go up to $362+shipping for holes of up to 3cm. Anything over that will have to be priced separately, depending on the fabric and complexity of the job, I guess asking them to darn my socks is a bit out of the question!