Upcycling the upcycling

Working on sewing projects inevitably results in fabric scraps. Upcycling often results in more scraps than virgin fabric because pre-made clothes have features like seams or screen printing that aren't easy to use in other projects. That means I need to upcycle my upcycling!

In the old days people used to save fabric scraps to stuff pillows. However, I have gotten used to modern pillows with fiberfill and don't particularly like to lay on lumps. Using finely shredded fabric would solve that problem, but you can't shred fabric in a home paper cutter and they don't make home fabric shredders. The cheapest industrial one I found online was $5,000.  There are textile shredding services, but they tend to serve customers bigger than just me. 

I live in a cold climate so I have been using these scraps to stuff "draft dodgers" that go at the bottom of exterior doors to stop cold air from coming in.  I took the idea from a member who posted about uses for fabric scraps on one of the Facebook pages associated with Zero Waste Saint Paul.

Making a draft dodger is an easy sewing exercise. In it's simplest form, you cut a rectangle of fabric about 10 inches high and the length of your door and frame (generally 35 to 45 inches) long. You fold the rectangle in half, right sides together.  Then you stitch a seam on the long edge to make a tube. I leave both the short seams unsewn. You then turn it inside out and stuff. 

The scraps need to be small enough to not get into a tangled mess. I have found it easier to stuff from both ends since the tubes tend to be pretty long. I use a rubber band on the end I am not stuffing so the material doesn't fall out. Then I sew up the ends. While I use a sewing machine, it would be easy enough to hand sew one. 

This winter I made at least a dozen draft dodgers for a donation to a wonderful organization I serve on the board of, Saint Paul Youth Services.  

I made my draft dodgers a little fancier than what I described above because I was using them to teach myself new sewing skills. So mine featured applique, piecework, pintucks and ruffles.

Here are some examples. 

Fixing my socks

During the pandemic I came to face my large pile of mismatched, random and holey socks. I decided to refrain from buying new socks for a while and use what I have. I haven't been going anywhere so I figured it was fine to wear mismatched and visibly mended socks.  And when I have to dress professionally again, I can continue to wear most of my mended socks because most of them are black and the repair is on the bottom of the sock.

Hand darning is a technique used to fill holes in clothes or linens. Basically you are weaving more cloth where it has ripped or worn down. You only need a few things to hand darn -  needle, thread (I use embroidery floss. You can also buy wool thread made specifically for darning) and scissors. It is also helpful to have an object under the hole like my Easter darning egg. When I darned my kid's pants, I used a flat Lego so I wouldn't catch the fabric on the other side! Beeswax can also help stiffen thread to make it easier to thread the needle and make the thread less likely to tangle. 

Most of my embroidery floss is composed of six strands. For cotton sock darning, I usually split the floss and use three strands. The first step in darning is to stich around the hole to reinforce the edges. If you are darning socks, you will not want to put a knot in the thread, but rather tuck the loose end into other threads. It is not comfortable to step on knots. The next step is to create long stiches with a very short in a perpendicular stich to keep the lines parallel. These stitches become the warp threads. 

Once these threads are in place, you make a small stitch to the place you can begin start weaving over and under making weft threads. When you finish one end, you put in a small perpendicular stitch and go back in the opposite direction.  You can find more details on how to darn on the Collette blog. 

Finish off the thread ends by going weaving the end into the work you have done. And then continue to wear your socks!

Darning and my darning egg

When I started my quest to save fabric I started with darning. And it's a good place for you to start if you are looking to mend clothing and linens rather than throwing them away.  In my view, fixing things is a forgotten skill in our age. 

You can darn by hand or darn by machine. Darning by hand requires very little equipment and minimal skills. You need embroidery floss, an embroidery needle, scissors and a darning egg, which will help you keep the shape of the item and keep you from catching the other side of the fabric if you are mending something tubular like a sock or the knee of kid pants. 

Because I try to use what is around, my darning egg is not one specifically designed for sewing.  My darning egg is a large green plastic Easter egg that I picked up at a junk swap at my workplace. 

You can make your darning more or less noticeable depending on whether you want visible mending or invisible mending. 

Here is one example of a sock I darned by hand using a contrasting embroidery floss.  

Here is an example of towel I mended using a sewing machine. This is less noticeable and happily I extended the life of this towel by 18 months and counting. 

I will share more information in an upcoming post on how to utilize these techniques, but I want you to first know that we can all fix things rather than throwing them away. 

Visible mending - Or how do I take care of that ink stain?

I own a mustard yellow and green dress made of linen. It's a unique design and I like to wear it in the spring and summer. Of course, a couple years ago I managed to get three ink stains on the chest area where someone couldn't help but notice. I washed the dress at home using various methods of removing stains. None of them worked. I took it to the dry cleaners and they couldn't remove the stains either. Then the dress sat there in my closet, but I really didn't want to get rid of it.  

Then I came across the article on visible mending I mentioned in my first blog post. I became slightly obsessed with visible meaning, reading everything I could cough up on the internet. Then I realized what I could with that dress that had been sitting in my closet.  I knew how to embroider daisies when I was seven. I should be able to do it again in my forties. 

I went to the local fabric store and stared at the various skeins of embroidery floss until I found one that matched with the color scheme. I also bought an embroidery hoop.  And then I Googled how to embroider daisy chains because, in the forty years between 2019 and when I learned to embroider, I had forgotten. I stitched over the stains and added more design elements. In the end the embroidery looked as if it had meant to be there.

My skills today are a bit better than they were in 2019. If I had to do it over again, I would have added a stabilizer to the fabric such as a light interfacing or some other lightweight fabric. However, even with my imperfect stitching, I could wear the dress again and I extended the use of the dress by a season or two. What if we all did this with our clothes?

First post

A picture from about 1977 that includes my mother, my brother and me wearing a dress my mother made

I am the daughter of immigrants from India. My mother grew up at a time when women were gaining more opportunity.  She went to college and then graduate school. She also learned  "domestic arts" such as sewing and knitting. She made many of my clothes when I was little and before she went to work as a computer programmer. I completed my first embroidery kit maybe in second grade. When I was in junior high my mother taught me to sew. I made many of my clothes when I was a teenager, but then I set it aside for nearly 30 years, not intentionally, but by happenstance. Every once in a blue moon I would take out my sewing machine, but it did not occur me to use it very much. 

Then in 2019, I read an article on visible mending in our local newspaper.  I will write more about that later. The article piqued my interest. That led me to take a couple classes at our local sewing store, Treadle Yard Goods. Then the pandemic hit. I made dozens of masks to donate. I made dozens of masks for our family.  I wrestled with my sewing machine before finally figuring out how to adjust the bobbin tension. The sewing machine has been on our kitchen table since then. 

Did you know that  according to the BBC in 2017, Americans threw away more than 13 million metric tonnes of fabric?  Fabric is difficult to recycle, but it can be repurposed. This blog will explore how I am doing that.