Mending a Leaf: A hands-on workshop for reimagining repair

Mending a Leaf is an alternative edition of the Making Mends workshop. It was first held at PLATE2025, the 6th Product Lifetimes and the Environment Conference. Aalborg University, Denmark, 2nd – 4th of July 2025

Mending a Leaf is a rapid, creative, and hands-on exercise in which participants are tasked to mend a leaf, followed by a group discussion about the thoughts, findings, and feelings they had in the process to explore broader notions of repair and care in (and out) of the context of the circular economy. The exercise was originally developed as the icebreaker of the “Making Mends” Workshop, a 3-hour-long workshop designed to practice visible mending and explore and strengthen the relationships with our garments. Mending a Leaf has been a useful and successful exercise to promote creativity and invites participants from all levels of mending experience to think critically about repair and care. The exercise aims to do two things. First is to let participants experience the steps of repair in a short time frame; observing, framing, planning, trying, failing, learning from and responding to the material, and trying again. Due to the unconventional prompt, most participants are faced with an unfamiliar challenge, which pushes their creativity and heightens their awareness of their repair processes. This connects to the second aim of the exercise: encouraging discussions about the broader meanings of repair and care. The marks of needle and thread on the leaf's surface, which was once a living entity, raise questions that reimagine the concept of repair. What does it mean to repair? How might we perceive brokenness And for whom do we make efforts to repair?