30. A Quick Guide to Repurpose and Upcycling Garments

Repurposing and upcycling is a revolutionary act of creativity and resourcefulness. These actions embody the spirit of transformation, taking garments worn and weathered and breathing new life into their tired fibers.

This episode talks about my favorite methods for upcycling garments, how I manage all the fabric from garments that are too far gone to save, and some new methods on my list to try!

Links:
Watch on YouTube for all the visuals! 

Mythic creatures stitchalong submission!

Taproot Magazine with article on patchwork

Mending Zine + sign up for my newsletter

Patchwork article on my blog (Part 1 and Part 2)

Tshirt loom from Like Minded Objects 

Transcript

Introduction and Mythic Creatures Stitch Along Recap

Even when fabrics are tattered to the point of falling apart, they continue to have use. It's just that that use might change. Even the tiniest scraps can serve as stuffing for a pillow or a quilt or stuffed animals. In the last episode, I talked about zero waste pattern making when designing clothing.

You know what one of the best zero waste options is? Repurposing and upcycling fabrics!  Before we jump into today's episode though, I just want to shout out to all of you who participated in last month's Mythic Creatures Stitch Along. Um, it's been absolutely incredible to see what everyone has made. So many beautiful works of art, um, and I'm going to be putting together like an online art exhibit for those works on my website, so be sure to check your mail for how to submit your image for this show.

If you missed the last stitch along, don't worry, I'm running another one in June. It will also be free, so keep your eyes out for an email for when that starts. If you're not already on my email list, you're going to want to get in there. Um, about once or twice a month, they share my favorite vintage textiles, textile art books, creativity and inspiration and encouragement.

And it's just all around. It's a great time.  Also a reminder that some of these podcast episodes like this one are also now able to be viewed on YouTube. So if you want to get any of the visuals that may go along with this episode, be sure to check it out there.  Onto today's episode.  

The Art of Upcycling and Repurposing Fabrics

Now, what I really love about repurposing and upcycling fabric is that it feels like this revolutionary act of creativity and resourcefulness.

These actions embody the spirit of transformation, taking garments that have been worn and weathered and breathing new life into their tired fibers. The most familiar aspect of this that we've all surely experienced is cut off jeans. Jean shorts. With absolutely no sewing, we have completely transformed a piece, allowing the washing machine to give us those gorgeous frayed edges that finish off the garment so well. 

We can then turn those cut off legs into infinite patchwork items. The leftover pieces give us an opportunity to play around and create. and construct an entirely new fabric using scraps.  Now looking back in time, quilts are another great example of historically how fabric was upcycled.  Clothing would be patched together to live a whole new life.

And I love getting my hands on old quilt pieces. I have like piles of them in the studio. I like to pick at their seams and see what's inside them, see what they're made of, getting any details I can about how or with what they're made of. I especially love doing this with layers of Kantha quilts. So Kantha quilts from India are usually layers of old fabrics that are too worn out to reuse, but they make a great batting layer.

So they're layered and layered and all these layers of fabrics are stitched together with rows of tiny running stitches to reinforce them and turn them into solid, long lasting blanket. I recently had the pleasure of taking a tour of a local friend's studio. So Bianca, the designer of Namai, who makes jackets like the one I'm wearing out of these worn out Kanthas.

And I love how she describes this as these being third generation materials. There's the original garment or fabric, the Kantha quilt that was created out of it. Then when these get old and maybe ripped or stained, Bianca cuts the jackets out of these usable areas. So cool. Especially because the way she designs them, they're entirely reversible.

So I wore this one on the more quiet side, so you didn't have to get blinded by all this print and pattern and the wild jacket. Uh, oh, and by the way, if you were on team, I don't want to cut up old quilts or I'm disturbed by that. I have an episode coming up for you. So stay tuned. But anyways, back on topic.

You can see the highlights of these confes on my blog. So go to the show notes to find more on that if you're interested in more about these confes.  

Clothing Donations: Dos and Don'ts

So upcycle clothing. Where do we start?  Let's start off by talking about clothing donations.  If a garment is in really good condition and doesn't have any stains or rips, you might just want to leave it or donate it as that garment still has plenty of life into it. 

If a garment is stained or torn or otherwise compromised, do not donate this. Don't put it in the bin. What happens is these donations end up being sent to the global south, where textile workers don't have to worry about it. who purchase large lots of these clothes to then resell are left with these unusable things.

So they unpack a lot and there's all these unwearable items. They can't make any money off of it. So not only are you kind of ruining their profession, it's also still going to end up in a landfill. It might as well be a landfill in your own backyard, or in our case, taken apart to upcycle. Don't make your trash someone else's problem though. 

So. Mending. Let's talk about if we've got a garment that is 

Mending Tips and Creative Repairs

So let's talk about if we have a garment that is compromised in one way or another.  Before you cut into some old garments to reconstruct them, see if first it can be mended. For clothing with minor damages, mending is the easiest, most sustainable way to upcycle garments. Fixing what you already have is always the most sustainable option.

Sure, you can cut a garment apart and put it back together, but are you going to end up with more waste than when you started off with? This is what sometimes concerns me about trends that involve upcycling clothes. I'm like, look at all the things you can do if you cut up your clothes. Is that if you're throwing away a bunch of the article of perfectly good clothing in order to make a new one, are you really upcycling or are you just making more trash?

Not to put any pressure on people that do this, I just, I think it's really important for them to find a great end game for the scraps that they're using besides just tossing them in the trash.  Um, just a little aside. 

Just a quick aside some examples of endgame for these textile scraps are donation places or on a smaller scale Stuffing pillows or other fluffy items using them for applique or other sort of textile collages I'll talk more about that later in this episode But if I'm stuffing an item I'll often use the fabric scraps for the area that requires a lot of stuffing So like the body of a stuffed animal and sort of wrap those that pile of fabric scraps and a layer of cotton batting So you still get that soft squishiness But that way you also don't have to buy a ton of cotton batting and you can reuse some materials You  Back to what to do with clothes you don't want. 

So we've got clothes to upcycle that we still like the fit of, but maybe it's stained or ripped. What do we do with these?  If you are dealing with a stain or a rip, I love using this as an invitation for creative collaboration with the universe. Maybe you can design an embroidery to cover it. That stain just happened to end there.

So it's not just about flopping, plopping a flower on top of that stain. 

So you've got this stain that's happened. Maybe we work with it and say like, Oh, I've been blessed with this spot. Not just plopping a flower right on top of that stain, but designing a pattern that gracefully moves with the garment and actually complements the form rather than just covering the flaw.

This is actually a big way that I started embroidering on clothing because I would find amazing vintage pieces that maybe had a little stain on the lapel or something, or a tear on a silk that couldn't be delicately mended. And I would make the problem area. Into the highlight of the entire garment, totally transforming it with the art of embroidery. 

I also love patching with actual compositions of patchwork. I wrote an article on this for Taproot magazine a few years back. I'll link that issue. Um, but I shared some of it on my blog for your convenience. 

I'll link that issue, but here are some images of it if you want to get an idea of what this was. Um, again, this takes the worn areas and asks you to work with the garment to breathe new life into it, finding fabrics that complement and coordinate with the garment, and building a new design to really revive and totally update this. 

I also share some of my favorite visible mending techniques in my Mendingzine. It's free, you can download that for free, also, it's also linked up in the show notes.  If the garment is ripping in a way that you're just unable to repair or you've already repaired it and it's just on its last leg, then we can start to look at how can I keep this out of the waste stream. 

Textile recycling places aren't always convenient or even cost effective since it does take quite a bit of processing to recycle. So how can we process them for our own uses? We kind of have to be our own textile recycling. Plants.  Personally, I mostly use upcycled garments for patchwork, focusing on mid weight wovens because these are the easiest to patchwork together.

This is like the weight that I normally work with. Anything else gets sorted out and put together. This makes it much easier for me to reuse them. So here's my sorting strategy for textile scraps and different cut up garments. 

So we want to be making squares and rectangles. So when I'm working with squares and rectangles, this is the easiest way of working with upcycled fabrics, the easiest way to patch them together. I've shared my favorite techniques for sewing these together on the blog. It's a technique that's best served by corresponding imagery.

So you're going to want to go ahead and check out that tutorial. But I find that starting with well sorted fabric scraps helps to keep this technique streamlined so that we can create a fabric, a new fabric of this patchwork that can easily be applied to new sewing projects. The key is using fabrics that are similar to each other so that the garment drapes properly.

So fabrics that flow nicely and lay nicely on the body. This means fabric weight is a big part about how I plan the sorting of my fabric scraps. When I first started writing this, I had a really solid idea of the best way to sort fabric scraps. But recently, 

when I first started planning this, podcast, I had a really solid idea of the best way to separate fabric scraps. But recently, while going through my own sewing detritus, I realized that it totally depends on what you're using the pieces for. So if you work with, let's say, dyeing your scraps, you might want to separate them by silk or cotton if you're working with, you know, natural dyes or even synthetic dyes.

Um, for example, Or, for example, 

or for example, if you're working with a lot of patchworking for quilts or something where the weight of the fabric isn't as important, um, you maybe don't need to sort them by weight. Let's say you make, like, sculptural art from patchwork and applique that are then stuffed, you might just want to separate them by colour and texture and just kind of move on.

But if you're patchworking fabric for garments, you're definitely want to We're going to want to have to separate them by weight first because you'll want the garment to be unified by the weight of the fabric  in this case fabric weight is really important. You don't want to sew like a slinky chiffon to a denim.

This is mostly for woven fabrics. 

Sorting and Using Fabric Scraps

This description. I don't really work with knits as much so that I don't have as many knit scraps. They're not that easy to patchwork, but I do have some other ideas for those coming up at the end of the episode. Um, so instead of separating scraps by color, I separate them by weight first, and then by color in these mini sections.

This way, when you're patching them together, you don't end up with this gorgeous selection of colors and realize, like, oh, wait, this heavy canvas is not going to drape well when it's sewn into this, like, delicate silk.  Also, silky chiffons are honestly kind of a pain to patchwork all together. Um, it's not impossible, though, it's good to save a project like that for a day when you're feeling pretty, like, go with the flow and just kind of  So here's the basic sections that I sort my scraps into.

I have my lightweight gauze, chiffons, habitai, silks. These are the things that just kind of turn into a crumpled pile of tissue paper in your scraps. I usually don't patch these, but I usually will use the snip and rip technique and use them as kind of like ropes, and you can twist them together. Um, you can also layer them, stitch on top of them, like the kanthas, or like a Japanese boro cloth.

Um, here is an example of a top that I made. Um,  Um, out of layers of scraps of cotton gauze and I stitched these layers together.  Next category, slippery things. These are sort of in between like velvet, slinky silks. They're kind of hard to sew but they're too substantial for layering or really delicate patchwork.

So I like to save these for applique or Back them with something nicely rigid, but ugly, more on that later. Midweight Wovens is the next category. This is gold. Patchwork your little heart out. I find my rectangle and my squares, I sew together different triangles to make squares, and I just try and make as much, um, as much as I can, like, patching them together. 

Now, the ugly fabrics. You know, ugly is a relative terminology, but that polyester gingham flannel in hot pink and optic white needs a place to go. I am not going to be patchworking that any time. So I use these as a base for wovens. So if I'm like quilting on a base, so sometimes when I'm, when you're working with quilts, you just want to like start Sew pieces onto a base fabric and give them support like when you're working with those slinkier fabrics.

This is great for that Last category is heavyweights. These are great as applique backgrounds or quilting with other similar weights I also love using these for making little bucket baskets. So when I have enough of a heavyweight fabric I'll go ahead and make these little bucket baskets. They're great in the studio for organizing.

They're a quick and easy sewing project I love these  Um, and the last category is knits. I honestly save knits as far as like upcycling them for cleaning and painting rags or, you know, working with them for rags where when you want to, when you have like a really dirty clean up job where you don't want to ruin a perfectly good towel, um, but you need a little more strength than just like a paper towel, those, those knits scraps are perfect rags.

It's the only thing I use them for. 

Cool Upcycling Ideas and Projects

Okay. Now let's wrap this up with some cool ideas I've seen, but I haven't tried.  There's a company called like minded objects and they designed this giant loom for upcycling t shirts. These things are not cheap at all, but it's such a cool design. They're modeled after those little potholder looms, but instead of weaving those little colorful, stretchy loops, you cut the body of t shirt, of a t shirt and width wise into loops, just cutting straight across it, and then you weave these on a giant scale.

Scale, and it got me thinking, how could you make one of these looms in your own home? Um, it could be a cool idea to make these for a pillow or a rug, or if you have weaver friends or a weaver yourself, just woven rag rugs using just a regular warp and weaving those scraps. You can do that with literally any fabric.

I've also seen quite a few tutorials for coil. Baskets using t shirts cut into strips. Honestly, it seems pretty time consuming. I tried it. It took forever. Also, I felt like I didn't need one I don't know. Maybe you didn't maybe you do need one. I just prefer to sew baskets out of my heavyweight scraps They work a little bit better for me.

But hey to each their own  Another fun idea. I want to play with inspired by Moroccan. What is it? It's boucher a rugs or something like that I'm not exactly sure of the pronunciation. I'm probably totally butchering it  But these are scrap fabrics woven in a way that the fabric creates like a Thick shaggy texture.

I don't weave. So I like to think about how I could take my tiniest of scraps and start to stitch them to a base and like leave little pieces of them off to get a similar effect. You'll also see this method in different floor mats. I think I, I think they're like Sri Lankan floor mats, where floor mats, where strips of the fabric are pleated and gathered and then stitched down to a base in rows.

Um, I definitely wanna try this when I get some free time. I feel like it would make a fabulous like. fringe vest or a bag or a pillow or something.  Free time. Free time in this economy! Just kidding. Um, not really. Anyways.  Okay. So, how about you? Do you have any ideas for fun new ways to upcycle fabric? I would love to hear about it.

Let me know over on Instagram and I would love to add to this collection of ideas. You can find me at Stitchwish on Instagram or at Christy J. Um, I would  love to hear from you. Um, just DM me. Actually, don't DM me. Yeah, just DM me. I think that's the best way. If you comment, I don't always see the comments, the way that the Instagram is organized, it's like they're trying to make it difficult for you to find anything.

Um, same with DMs! Um, I would actually rather you just email me, but anyways, okay. Uh, thanks so much for tuning in, and next episode I will finally be interviewing my friend Pam. We're gonna have a great conversation about, um, 

Conclusion and Upcoming Interview with Pam

clothing, wardrobe, style, sustainability, and how to work with all of those, um, in a way that is really supportive of our own self image and really, um, encouraging us to just like be in the bodies that we're in and look great being in them.

Okay. See, see ya. All right.  That's it. That's it. Bye.