Alumni Profiles

Stitching Together Community and Sustainability

25 at 25 | Anna-Marie Janzen (CMU '12)

Thursday, September 18, 2025 @ 8:00 AM  |  Alumni Profiles

Anna-Marie Janzen's earliest childhood memory is sewing.

She recalls sitting on the kitchen floor with her grandmother, playing with giant, oversized plastic needles and shaped cards as her grandma taught her the fundamentals of stitching and threading.

Today, roughly three decades later, Janzen runs Reclaim Mending, a sewing and alterations shop from her home in Winnipeg's West End, where she repairs, alters, and transforms clothing.

From these early lessons, she developed a skill set that would later become the foundation of her business. "I tend to specialize in making [repairs] as invisible as possible," Janzen explains, focusing on hand-sewn fixes for jeans, sweaters, and other garments.

While studying peace and conflict transformation studies at CMU, Janzen discovered the real value of the skills she had developed early on in the kitchen with her grandma.

She says once, a fellow student left money and a note in her mail cubby after she repaired his clothing. "He said, 'You should get paid for your labour,'" she recalls. This small act sparked a realization: her craft was more than a hobby—it could be a meaningful vocation.

"Having that community and seeing that I had a skill that I could use for my community... fixing some of my friends' clothes just because I could," Janzen says. "That close-knit, small community made it easier to see where your skills could be helpful."

CMU's small community and class sizes offered more than academic instruction—they fostered insight and reflection. "The kind of care that the professors had for each individual student was remarkable. That was something that I really noticed benefiting me," Janzen says.

Her studies challenged her to think critically about global issues, poverty, and conflict, while also examining the social and environmental impacts of industries such as fashion.

Janzen graduated from CMU in 2012, and after a period working with the Canadian Food Grains Bank, Janzen returned to sewing full-time, intertwining her craft with her values. Reclaim Mending now operates as a small but thriving workshop, offering sewing lessons and creating items entirely from reclaimed materials.

Janzen sees her work as a response to fast fashion: repairing garments prolongs their life, reduces waste, and helps people form a deeper connection to their clothing.

"A big part of my purpose in my business is helping people not have to buy new clothes. Repair because it's the right thing to do."

Family heritage remains at the heart of her practice. Machines and tools passed down from her grandmother and great-grandmother surround her workshop, linking her craft to generations before her.

"I'm literally surrounded by my family in a lot of ways," she says.

Janzen's has turned what began as a childhood pastime into a business that sustains both community and environment.

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