Scissors, colorful embroidery floss, and scrap fabric abounded at the Visible Mending and Merch-Making workshop in Sawyer Library’s Fabrication Lab — colloquially referred to as the “Fab Lab.” For two hours on Sunday afternoon, students meandered in and out of the studio, bringing projects, ideas, and conversation.
WCFM and the Zilkha Center for the Environment collaborated to host the event, hoping to emphasize community-building through sustainability. Mending materials and tools were provided by the Fab Lab and attendees were invited to bring old clothing in for repair and refurbishment. According to Giulianna Bruce ’25, one of WCFM’s general managers, the workshop has been in the making for several years.
Contrary to many student’s complaints about a small social scene, Bruce hopes to make the College “feel even smaller,” she explained, by bringing students together. “My main thing this year for the radio station has been trying to reach broader audiences outside the immediate DJ community,” she said. “And create these alliances with other groups on campus that maybe were unexpected.”
This semester, the WCFM events team, led by Chris Gontarek ’25, hopes to expand the station’s student listener base, Bruce said. The event’s soundtrack, WCFM 91.9 playing over the steady snips of scissors, was part of that effort, giving participants a sampling of Sunday’s programming. “People mostly listen to the radio station if they know their friend is on, and then they’ll only listen for that hour,” she said. “But it’s nice to just have it playing.”
The Zilkha Center interns also said that they saw collaborating with WCFM as a way to bring a wider group of students into their own work, explained EcoRep Morgan Eigel ’27. “It’s definitely catering to a creative group of people,” she said. “[But] I think this is the right place to start a creative, sustainable merch mission… It’s [also] just a cool skill to build and to expose people to.”
After showing off her newly patched jeans, Eigel explained that one of the workshop’s goals was to reduce fashion waste from student groups. “The interns at the Zilkha Center are concerned with the kind of stuff RSOs give away and [whether there is] a way to limit the amount of merch that [they] make,” she said.
According to Bruce, the event encouraged students to up-cycle items into new pieces to rep their favorite artist, band, or radio station. “This is a good opportunity [to] bring your old clothes and give new life to a shirt that you otherwise don’t really wear,” she said. “That’s what I’m doing. I’m just sewing W, C, F, and M onto this shirt that I’ve never really worn.”
The practice extends beyond sustainability, as wearing mended clothing can also be seen as a fashion statement, Carlton Roe ’27, a member of the WCFM events team, explained. “One thing I love about mending is the way that you kind of show things off,” he said. “You mend something, and then you have a part of your clothing that is sending the signal to people that you took the time to mend it.”
For Eigel, the benefits of mending reach even further. “The other thing is that it encourages you to take better care of the clothes,” she said. “Yes, it’s a pair of jeans that I got from some fast fashion store in high school, but now … I want to pay attention to how much I wash them because I want to make sure that my patches will stay on for a long time.”
Most participants came away with more than just a practical patch. Menders considered fabric texture, color, and shape during the design process to create new pieces. “You took a pair of jeans that maybe weren’t designed to last this long,” Bruce said of Eigel’s project. “And you’ve breathed a new life into them.”
[Phoebe Pallesen, a programming director at WCFM and a managing editor at the Record, was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.]
