This presentation invites thought and dialogue into what it can mean to mend as acts of caring for relationship and avoiding breakage further along instead of, or as a complement to, mending as fixing the broken. Our invitation starts from the special case of growing a window blind inside the Holding Surplus House (HSH). This article recounts the collective story of growing a window blind inside the Holding Surplus House (HSH). Holding Surplus House is a research project and a mustard yellow wooden mobile house that provides a physical and conceptual framework. We use the Tiny House on Wheels (THoW) to explore transformative practices and imaginaries of alternative realities such as eco-socially just householding with resources, living with climate challenges, and multispecies cohabitation.

One way of exploring transformative practices with the THoW is to work with seasonal interventions that turn creative practices away from universal answers. In the summer the sun heated up the THoW to the brink of unbearability if it was placed in direct sunlight. In winter, we felt exposed when staying in the THoW whilst the windows were uncovered. A situated practice was thus to try to make the house a production space for good-enough livelihood for its own inhabitants.

We developed the specific seasonal experiment of growing a window blind from a grassy carpet grown on the floor of the THoW. We also staged a collective experience of harvesting the grass that revealed gaps in the flimsy and fragile root growth resulting from mold and drought. In addition, even more were welcome to try the juice of the barley grass

Inviting others to give form to a household that takes what is at hand and strives to share a surplus, we invited to a mending unseminar, as a practice-based seminar, where we used the vitality of the interwoven roots as the foundation for collective mending while exchanging stories of textile situationships as a dynamic and evolving relationship between textiles, caring, and people. These moments where textiles play a significant role in collective action are often overlooked but can be rich sources of inspiration and communal learning - and perhaps even a cultural heritage to emphasise in addition to object-based cultural heritage. A patchwork of stitching together threads and conversations emerged as a recipe for care, repair, and joy to create advanced artistic practice and life skills.