Mending Club 

Are the sweatpants you’ve had on since March wearing thin? With COVID-19 restrictions making it hard to get to your favorite clothing store for a replacement, it may be worth learning a new skill: mending. The DC Public Library has a virtual mending club for both experienced menders and beginners, perfect for when you need a quick stitch and there for you when you want to connect with fellow sewing fans. The plus of joining this intimate group is you get the insight of two expert menders and feedback from the entire collective. Participants are invited to bring their questions on how to fix common issues via sewing and to show off their sewing projects. You may get some good ideas on how to keep yourself occupied as we brave the next several months of fall and winter quarantine. The class begins at 5 p.m. on Sept. 30. Registration is available at dclibrary.org. Free. —Chelsea Cirruzzo

Carol Barsha: Within My Meadow

In Carol Barsha’s world, there are no rules. In her exhibition Within My Meadow, on display this month at Gallery Neptune and Brown, the artist paints giant, vibrant flowers covering large-scale canvases that skew wildlife proportions, like a dainty bird the size of a few petals perched on top of a towering bud. Flora and fauna are paired in environmentally impossible combinations—but not for Barsha’s lack of botanical knowledge. She self-describes her work as “surreal and expressionist,” and shows her expertise in her subject matter through her attention to floral anatomy. Yet Barsha takes creative liberties and displays her appreciation for the natural world through its distortion. “With Nature as my subject,” she says, “I am allowed to create a new world where there are no rules of perspective and proportion.” Barsha explains that her approach to art is largely inspired by her mentor, New York School artist Philip Guston, who was known for bringing the abstract expressionist movement into a more representational approach. Guston approached his work as if he were painting a world that had never been seen before, and Barsha writes that his viewpoint inspired her to discover the natural world as the object of painting. “My aim,” Barsha describes, “is to explore the exquisite beauty of simple and complex structures in the visual world, and to express my own wonder by capturing the essence of some detail—be it a bird’s nest or a flower—and to recreate it in a new way.” The exhibition is on view to Oct. 31. Images are available at galleryneptunebrown.com. Free. —Katie Malone