When you throw a rock in the pond, ripples emerge as a result of that action. This Sew it Again project is not exactly a rock, rather a deliberate and sustained action that is demonstrating the multitude of ways we can reclaim our wardrobes by resewing.
Over the past few decades as women relished long-denied educational and workplace opportunities, we readily outsourced our clothing requirements. Home-made was considered old-fashioned and we embraced easy (and cheap) opportunities to buy off the rack.
The more we bought into the fashion thing, the more we lost the skills and confidence to ‘do for ourselves’ thereby becoming disempowered and dependent on fashion houses and clothing supply chains.
In the same way the food revolution reclaimed the freedom, pleasure and nourishment enabled by home-cooking and baking skills, we are poised to revive home-sewing skills as part of the fashion revolution.
There are important environmental reasons why we need to rethink how we engage with our clothes because the waste associated with our current clothing habits is staggering and unsustainable. And there are compelling personal reasons (for some, not all) to get back into home sewing and stitching that include empowerment, satisfaction and creative pleasure.
Somehow we have been brainwashed into thinking we either buy new clothes off the rack, or if we sew, we buy new fabric and patterns. The third way is refashioning what already exists in our own wardrobes or op-shops bulging with reject and unworn natural resources.
My favourite saying is: leadership is an action, not a position. That’s why I’m upcycling every day this year with the Sew it Again project to demonstrate that third way – how we can mend, modify and resew what already exists rather than buying new resources.
And it is exciting to see my fashion revolution colleague Kirsten Lee taking up the challenge with her Fix-It, Refashion it Workshop at the University of Technology, Sydney where she is encouraging people to bring along existing garments to repair or refashion. Great to see Kirsten inspiring others to reuse what they have – join her on June 2 if you are in Sydney.
Upcycle 141 is a jeans to skirt convo and a neckline refashion. Jeans rarely work well for the pear-shaped figure type, so I’ve reshaped the denim from opshop jeans into a skirt and supplemented it with denim reclaimed from another reject pair of a similar shade. It is hard to show how this upcycle came together, but firstly I cut the legs from the body just below the zip and this forms a waistband for the skirt. I cut open the jean legs and stitched them together to form the bulk of the skirt. I just overlap the raw edges and zigzag in place. I overlapped various offcuts to get some angular shapes happening at the front of the skirt, and tied some of the seam offcuts to act as a belt. The top was a cotton-blend stretch turtle-neck which I refashioned with a strip of denim cut on the cross/bias. When I cut away the old neckband it stretched out much further than I thought, so I ran a gathering stitch around it to draw the raw edges back in. I cut strips of denim on the cross and sewed these together into a circle, the circumference of which equates with how wide I wanted the new neckline to be. I pinned both neck pieces together and stitched in place, then turned the raw edge down to make a collar. Cutting on the cross makes all the difference and enables you to ease both pieces to fit together. Have fun experimenting or organise an upcycling workshop near you.
