Detail at a fine level is deeply important to Diane Moore, a Magnolia resident who owns and runs Sallymender Reweaving and Fine Mending.
It has to be.
"I make holes disappear," she explained in her downtown store. And Moore does that with a technique few people master anymore.
"If you get a hole in a pair of pants or nice jacket," she said, " I'll take a piece material, place it over the top of [the hole], and weave the ends in. Some of them [the holes] completely disappear."
The patch - or swatch - material is taken from another part of the garment, Moore said, and it's cut about half an inch larger than the hole so that individual threads are hanging free on all sides (see closeup photo above).
"I have a very fine pointed, latched needle," she added. "It looks like a [hinged] fishhook on the end, and I put that through the cloth and grab each end and actually reweave it back into the material."
Moore also uses a technique she calls thread weave. "I don't use material, I use individual threads," she said. "And it's where I replace every single broken thread with another thread." Moore harvests the threads from other parts of the garment such as the seams, for instance.
"Whenever I see a small hole, I recommend it," she said, adding she only uses thread weaving on small holes because the work is so time-consuming.
"The other thing I do is re-knit sweaters," Moore said. "If you've got a big moth hole, I can make it go away." She can also turn a turtleneck into a crew neck sweater.
Sometimes Moore can take lengths of yarn from the damaged sweater, but finding useable yarn on a hand-knit sweater is almost impossible, she said. "If I have to, I'll take a whole row out ... and then knit it back together."
That gives her a single length of yarn, but she also has several small chests of yarn in her home, where Moore does almost all of her work. She usually just takes orders and provides consultation at the downtown store.
Moore has collected the yarn from other sweaters she has tailored over the years, and she has a dizzying collection of colors.
"Just in pale pink, you go into hundreds," she said. "And it's not only the colors, it's the weight of the yarn, it's the sheen."
Early beginnings
Originally from Illinois, Moore got an early start as a seamstress. "I started sewing when I was probably 5 years old," she said. "I've always done fine needlework."
But she started out at Sallymender as only a counter girl almost eight years ago. Opportunity soon presented itself, though. "The day I got the job was the day the [staff] weaver went to Japan for a month's vacation," Moore remembers.
"And I'd never seen this done," Moore said of reweaving. "This fascinated me. I didn't know it could be done."
Moore said she is one of those people who just has to know how things are done, so she played with the specialized needles and studied the samples to get a feeling for the techniques.
"Before long, I'd almost figured out how to do it myself."
The owner of Sallymenders, a woman whose first name was Sally, was impressed and offered her some tips, Moore added.
"So I started practicing and by the time the weaver came back from Japan, I'd pretty much gotten the gist of it."
A variety of projects
Moore has honed her skills over the years, and she works on a wide variety of repairs. About half of them involve reweaving and half re-knitting, she said.
Moore said she often repairs $300 cashmere sweaters and $1,000 gabardine suits, but that's not all she does. Moore repairs vintage clothes, as well, but she cautioned that the repairs usually cost more than the customers paid for the retro clothes in the first place.
She's also fixed up an old Japanese tapestry, letter jackets and "cherished items" like baby blankets. "Baby blankets!" she said. "I mean, how can you get any more special than that?"
The most unusual item she has repaired was an antique cat doll that had been appraised at $12,000, Moore said.
The woman who brought it in was practically in tears because her elderly mother had recently given the doll to her and was due for a visit. The problem was, the woman's dog had chewed off the back of the doll's head.
"And I'm looking at this doll, and it's an old rag doll made out of fake fur" Moore said. "And it's so old the fur is [almost] all gone from the material."
The woman had somehow found a piece of fake fur that matched the cat doll. "But it was new, so I had to dip it in tea to give it a faintly yellow look," she said, "and I had to take sandpaper and steel wool and rub it down till it looked distressed just like the other pieces."
Moore said she was sure the cat doll was no longer worth $12,000 when she was finished with repairs. "But I do think it looked as close I could get to what it looked like before."
Customers from all over
"I get things from all over the country," Moore said of clothing needing specialized repairs. She also got something needing repairs from Poland, and one of her customers has been a Seattle doctor who now lives in Scotland.
"Nordstrom sends me a lot of customers," she also said of the chain's stores in Seattle, Spokane, Portland and Anchorage.
In better years, she was one of four reweavers working for the business, but the others have moved, quit or died, Moore said. "It's only me left now."
What she'd really like to see is an apprentice joining the business. But Moore warned that it takes the proper aptitude and an eye for detail to do the work she does.
The market for the skills is certainly there, according to Moore. "There's too many people who care about their clothes," she said.
Plus, many find the idea of paying $30 to fix a $300 sweater or $70 to repair a $1,000 suit more attractive than buying new duds, Moore noted.
There are also other rewards besides money. Moore said she has gotten flowers, bath salts, lottery tickets, tears of gratitude and hugs for her work. "The hugs are the best," she added.
Moore can be reached at 623-3221.
Staff reporter Russ Zabel can be reached at 461-1309 or rzabel@nwlink.com
