Mending, Boro and Katha

I've been pinning of pictures mending on Pinterest and am drawn to the beautiful texture created when holes and tears are mended.

Japanese "Boro" repaired kimonos

This evening I started worked on mending a pair of pants for a friend of mine.  She had not sewn in years and a couple months ago we made a date to go to fabric stores in San Francisco where she picked out a lovely textured two-layer black and cream silk at Britex (read $$$$.) She was ready to make her favorite pants pattern.

After wearing the pants several times my friend was very upset to find the fabric was shredding.  I asked her to bring them over so we could take a look at what was going on.  She had carefully hand washed the pants so it was not that.  We looked at the wear pattern which was mostly on the left "cheek" of the pants and a little further down that leg.

I remembered that my friend has a mesh seat with back support in her car.  The mesh was the culprit! When she twisted on that mesh to get out of the car the fabric was being abraded.

So... we had a conversation about mending the pants.  How she could consider the fabric in those pants as an evolving fabric, since given the delicate nature of the fabric it was likely to show more wear over time (even with the mesh seat covered for future car trips.) I mended the most abraded area with DMC embroidery floss using a running stitch in a manner similar to recycled Indian saris "Kantha" quilts and Japanese "Boro" mended kimonos (as pictured above.)  I also inherited the car seat : >.