Darners in conversation – a collaboration with moths

Darners in conversation – a collaboration with moths

This week we’re so happy to be able to bring you a little podcast of a talk that was held at Loop in November 2019. We held our ‘Darners in Conversation’ talk in the shop in November 2019 with Hikaru Noguchi, Celia Pym and Rachael Matthews. We hope you enjoy listening to this fascinating conversation.

We held the talk to celebrate the launch of the English edition of Hikaru’s book, Darning Repair Make Mend, which is now incredibly popular at Loop! We wanted people that were interested, but couldn’t be with us at Loop, to have a chance to hear this wonderful discussion about visible mending from these three incredibly talented women!

We did originally record the whole talk as a video so that we could share it with you all but sadly the quality was not good enough for us to post it. We are therefore sharing this recording! We apologise for the background noise at the very beginning, we were not able to edit this out.

Darners in conversation – a collaboration with moths – listen here!

Hikaru Noguchi is a visible mending guru in Japan, and is widely known for her beautiful knitwear collections. She adds wonderful dimensions to her work by adding intricate visible mending using many different techniques.

Celia Pym is our resident darning expert at Loop, she teaches at the shop every few months!(We have two new dates for Celia’s classes, one in June and one in September.) She is an artist working with darning, embroidery and knitting. Celia is also a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art.

Rachael Matthews is a textile artist and designer, who’s approach to mending is about honouring and preserving treasured items owned by loved ones. Until 2016 Rachael ran the art space and knitting shop Prick Your Finger in East London, and now teaches at Central Saint Martins.

Now you’re inspired…

We have had an influx of truly gorgeous tools and materials for darning, embroidery and visible mending recently! We want to share some of them here with you.

Hikaru has a wonderful collection of handmade darning mushrooms, and she kindly painted some in colours exclusive to Loop! We have olive, turquoise and rose colour ways that you can’t get anywhere else in the world. We have also restocked the English edition of Hikaru’s book, so you can learn all about mending from scratch.

We have lots and lots of Temaricious threads at the shop at the moment. Temaricious threads are hand dyed using plants and natural materials in Japan, and we just love them at Loop! We have several different kinds of their threads, including indigo dyed cotton bundles, and cotton thread sets.

Loop also stocks beautiful bundles of plant dyed cashmere from Temaricious – these would be good for darning that special cashmere jumper you have, or for precious stitching.

Brand new at the shop is Teinture Sauvage. Teinture Sauvage roughly translates to “Wild Dye”. The beautiful yarns and colours achieved by Celine come form working with only 100% natural wool and dyes with full traceability. These beautiful boxes of mini skeins are especially for Loop, and they come in sweet hand stamped card boxes. We’re honoured to have these in the shop.

Lots of people must love these as much as we do, because we’re almost out of stock! We will be getting more of these lovely boxes in the next few weeks.

Lastly, we have some brand new embroidery and darning needles from Tulip! The metal embroidery needles come in several different sizes and styles; we have needles for Sashiko, general embroidery and tapestry. We also have cute pink plastic darning needles from Tulip, which are perfect for weaving in ends on the go! The packaging for all of these different needles is just gorgeous, perfect for gifts!

We hope you enjoyed listening to this talk, and this latest instalment of all the goodies and beautiful happenings at Loop!

Hikaru Noguchi darning mushrooms at Loop London
Hikaru’s darning mushrooms – we just love them!

1 Comment on “Darners in conversation – a collaboration with moths

  1. What an inspiring conversation. Even found myself writing down key phrases and thoughts. Thanks so much for sharing. xx

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