The world’s population has grown excessively in the past few decades, and the same period also witnessed improvements in living standards. These two arguments influenced the need of textiles, which in turn increased textile production. Global production of all apparel and textile fibers amounted to more than 110 million tons annually, leading to the generation of high amount of textile wastes.(https://www.intechopen.com/books/waste-in-textile-and-leather-sectors/textile-wastes-status-and-perspectives). In order to ensure sustainability and reduce environmental impacts in the textile and fashion sector, it is the most important to recycle, up-cycle, reuse, give new functions to used clothes or fabrics.
Keeping that in mind I never throw any scraps of fabric away. I have excessive amounts of different fabrics, yarns and threads. Probably all the colours in the world are in my thread’s basket. I acquired them over three years in college as well as doing my personal projects. In the past I would source a lot of fabrics and threads in the shops. I would get exact colours of fabrics and threads from various colour palettes that teachers used to ask us to use at the college. But now I am trying to reuse of what I have. Moreover, I am trying to source fabrics, yarns and threads at the charity shops. Even tho sometimes the resources there are limited, many of them have quite rich haberdashery sections.
My at-home haberdashery.
I have not purchased ANYTHING new for my current project. I let the fabrics and yarns that I already had to dictate my colour scheme as well. That worked well and I am feeling content of giving new life to old scrappy fabrics, and making them into something beautiful.
Having so much fabric on my hands and all these thoughts about sustainability I decided to do a weave piece using only fabric scraps.
I started to pick up random stripes of fabric which more or less were in my colour palette. I ended up finding some cut offs of gathered white fabric. I remembered using the manual gatherer at the college. These peaces were straight to the point, considering my collected data for the project. They perfectly represent the music frequencies I have drawn before. I decided to use them. I weaved on elastic string, just to experiment. Then later added hand stitch, to reflect the music frequencies, mentioned before. Because I used fabric strips, the final result was quite bulky and rough, the elastic balanced it, and gave a feeling of lightness. I really like this piece off weave.
Sometimes I end up with threads in my hand which looked beautiful at the charity shop but when used, are not serving much purpose, are sturdy or difficult to handle. Never mind! We can fix that! Today I tried some yarn twisting. I took three kinds of yarn and twisted them together!
First white yarn was in the started pack, it is lovely and I did use it in my previous samples, but it is really capricious. Since it’s already twisted together, it usually unravels while being used. Plus I just had a little bit left, therefore I decided to make it into something different for its last use.
Second “hairy” blue yarn was also running low and I used it for its aesthetic properties.
Third yarn I recently bought at the charity shop. It looked lovely while in the ball, but then when I started to use it, it seemed to have tissue paper through it (?). It was constantly falling apart. Therefore I though it would be good to improve. It has a slight shine to it, it’s a good addition to the trio.
As you can see, I tied all three yarns to the door of my wardrobe and started twisting. I followed the tutorial that my teacher Lindy provided in her video. I twisted using a lot of tension, in order for the yarns to stay together. The yarns were tangling together a lot, therefore it took me a bit of time to finalise the task. But the results were totally worth it! Look at how beautiful is my new yarn! I couldn’t wait to use it.
I used the newly made thread to darn, it was a little bit hard to use because it was pretty thick. Regardless it looked so good! I also used the remains of the previous weaving. I ended up throwing away very little thread.
We all have to put our part to be more conscious about consuming. And since I am now circulating in the industry which produces almost the most waste, I must be especially careful of what I use and how. Hope I can inspire my peers and we can all together make some changes!
What an inspiring post. I love the idea of you challenging yourself to buy absolutely nothing for the project. Your plied yarns sound great, specifically because you have taken the time to analyse the properties of each yarn, and have reasoned why you need to ply it up, and what you are plying it with.
Looking forward to seeing how you might develop this in your future projects, well done.
Great reflections happening here Ruta! I am enjoying the level of detail of your description of your ‘Home Habadashery’ – if we all had one of these we would save so much resources and landfill space!
If you upload your Project 3 developments here I can give you feedback asap, to make sure you are all up to speed on that! I am looking forward seeing which direction you have taken your project!
Maija (Project 3 tutor)