Fifth year scholar brings sustainable mending to campus
The Fifth Year Scholars Program offers exceptional students the opportunity to stay at CMU after graduating. This year, a civil and environmental engineering graduate is here to bring sustainable mending to the CMU and Pittsburgh communities.
The Fifth Year Scholars Program at Carnegie Mellon University is highly selective. Only a handful of exceptional students receiving their undergraduate degree are selected to become Fifth Year Scholars. Those who are selected are welcomed back to campus for an additional year with free tuition and a $7,000 fellowship to pursue a project of their choosing.
For the 2024-2025 academic year, there are four such Scholars from various colleges, and Kat D’Arms is one of them. D’Arms received her bachelor’s in environmental engineering from the Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department in the spring of 2024. But she knew that after the 2024 summer break, she would not be going off to pursue a new career or higher degree just yet. D’Arms applied to the Fifth Year Scholars Program in her junior year and was selected well before her graduation date. She had time to carefully plan out what her Scholar project would entail.
As an environmental engineer, D’Arms is passionate about sustainability. With the knowledge that the fashion industry is the second largest polluter in the world (just behind oil and gas pollution), she keeps her closet pared down and is mindful about where she buys her clothes and what kind of materials the clothes are made from. “Clothing is made of stuff,” she points out. “In a lot of cases, it’s oil, it’s just plastic… and even if it’s not, it’s made of something like cotton, which is incredibly nutrient-intensive and takes a lot of water to farm. And it’s often farmed in places that don’t have that much water to begin with.”
Part of keeping her pollution footprint small is knowing how to mend her clothing so that objects that require minor repairs are not simply cast aside into a landfill.
Clothing is viewed as really disposable, because it’s so cheap. And it’s so poorly made that it falls apart after a few wears.
Kat D’Arms, Fifth Year Scholar and CEE Alumna
“Clothing is viewed as really disposable, because it’s so cheap. And it’s so poorly made that it falls apart after a few wears,” explains D’Arms. She said that people can fight back on consumption by buying second-hand clothing at thrift stores (such as The Thrifty Mellon, a student-run, pop-up style shop on CMU’s campus) and vintage shops. But D’Arms knows that thrifting offers limited sizes and styles. “It’s difficult to find stuff that fits you really well… so you need this set of [mending] skills as well.”
With this in mind, D’Arms decided to share her mending knowledge with her community at CMU. She started as a sophomore, bringing mending programming and drop-in hours to Tech Spark, the largest campus maker space, which includes a sewing area. The mending workshops were popular, so D’Arms decided to expand them outside of Tech Spark. She started by doing a few mending workshops at more centrally located buildings on campus, such as the Cohon University Center.
She also hosted workshops in the basement of Hunt Library where the IDeATe (Integrative Design, Arts, and Technology) Collaborative Making Facility is located. As part of her studies, D’Arms took one of IDeATe’s courses from the Soft Technologies track, focusing on the manufacturing of textiles. D’Arms learned about various processes such as weaving, spinning thread, and dyeing. While she thought the course was fascinating, she believed someone looking for quick mending instructions could benefit from a course focused solely on the practice of mending. So she developed curriculum and taught a StuCo (student-taught course) that students could take for course credit while learning mending techniques.
“My class is focused on sewing techniques that are required for maintenance,” she explains. “There are four different stitches that you can use to fix different kinds of rips, on different kinds of cloth.”
D’Arms has even expanded into offering workshops with business partners in the Pittsburgh area such as the Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse, the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh, the Big Idea Bookstore, restaurants and coffee shops like Trace Brewing, and Pittsburgh Public Parks during nice weather.
D’Arms will continue to offer mending sessions for the rest of the academic year. People who are interested in learning these techniques can follow her on Instagram @mendwithkat where she posts the schedules for her upcoming campus and community free mending workshops.