On the final Monday of each month, the Davidson Arts and Creative Engagement (DACE) studio in the North corner of the Chambers basement hosts “mending monday” offering alterations, mending, cropping, thrift flips and patching services. Students and faculty come in with tattered jeans and buttons that need to be replaced and are led through the process of repair by a few Arts Fellows. While these students act as expert seamstresses for one day a month, the fellows program allows students to work in arts administration, create and share a passion for the arts and advocate for the arts.

DACE strives “to integrate the arts into the daily lives of students, faculty and staff.” DACE operates under the direction of Sherry Nelson, a long-time Davidson employee. Nelson began in 1993 and has supported Davidson students’ engagement with campus life and the arts since then. Mending Monday is one of her more recent projects.

I came into the DACE on a dreary Mending Monday morning with two items of clothing I needed repaired. The studio offered a bright and calming environment for a project I had put off in favor of studying. This is exactly the vision Nelson had for the space when the studio opened in 2023. Nelson has seen the beneficial impact on student stress because of the reprieve from academics engagement in a creative project DACE provides.

Mending is a larger action than just stress-relief. Sabrina Mowery ’28 is a DACE special events manager and art fellow. “Mending in particular is important because of the role it plays in environmental sustainability and the preservation of historic, tactile skills.”

Mowery finds herself in a role as a leader of this event because she is manager of events at DACE and an experienced seamstress who has spent many hours in the DACE studio working on her own mending, alterations and quilting. 

Nelson and Mowery are passionate about the process and result of mending and hope that through these monthly events, students will learn the valuable skill of sewing to reduce their individual and environmental sustainability. “It is crucial to wear the clothes you have for as long as possible, since the material already exists and it would require additional energy to recycle it,” Mowery said.

“As a skill, mending is becoming a lost art. So much of our lives are now digital, so we have to actively work to learn and preserve tactile skills like sewing, weaving, and other arts and handicrafts. So mending is a win-win. You help preserve the environment, gain historically significant skills and make unique clothes in the process,” Mowery continued.

I left the studio with freshly sewed items ready for wear. In the time I spent in DACE between classes, I chatted with Nelson about why she believes in student engagement in the arts, learned how to pin tears and run them through the sewing machine and enjoyed the bright environment of the DACE studio that is open to any and all students to create in community.