Ware / Care — Personal Blog

Ware / Care was a personal blog I started in 2021, now defunct. It worked with recipes from the late nineteenth-century A Manual of Mending and Repairing by Charles Leland, which includes varied instructions for repairing clothes with raw wool felting, imitating ivory and gems, ceramic riveting, and re-lining paintings.

Leland was a Philadelphia writer and mystic with an ambition was to set up a technical college of repair in London, which sadly did not come to fruition. His writing is typical of the period in its floridity, including lengthy anecdotes from his time living with itinerant travelling communities, references to classical literature, and jibes at fellow practitioners.

I explored these instructions through enactment — one of my favourite posts was an experiment in mending earthenware flower pots with brass lace, which was a precursor to my current PhD project. A few of the surviving images of this can be found below.