Using Your Textile Waste 

Textile Waste Patches 

As a Barclay Simpson Fellow in Public Scholarship, I decided to use waste materials themselves to critique fast fashion commodity chains. 

Below you can see my initial attempts to create iron on patches from fabric scraps (gifted by friends or purchased at Goodwill). I learned that using waste materials can be challenging because the fabric has already been manipulated over its life, and therefore might not behave in the way that you would expect. I also experimented with different ways of upcycling the fabric before turning it into patches. The "Care for What You Wear" and "A Bit of TLC" patches were printed with stamps I carved and textile printing ink. The QR codes were both created using iron on transfers. The "Revolution" patch was created using ink and a paintbrush. The edges were finished on a sewing machine, as that is all that I had access to. This also was the most practical way to secure the adhesive backing that makes the patches iron on. 

Screen Printing in Kantamanto

University of Washington's "Trash Art" Competition (Spring 2024)

2nd place prize for Textiles in University of Washington’s 2024 “Trash Art” competition

Recycling is a way of being. It requires care, time and commitment to reuse items that can so easily be discarded in our society. Hackney et al (2022) offer participatory fashion practices as an important tool for both generating a sensibility for sustainability and for potentially combating the harms associated with political economies of fast fashion. Most textile waste from the Global North is exported to countries in the Global South, exacerbating social and environmental inequalities between the two. Finding creative ways to transform the scraps of fabrics and textiles that come when I modify my clothing required an entirely new perspective. Everything is linked! To have the scraps to make this pouch, I had to save waste fabric and hold onto leftover elements of other projects. My making (largely knitting) and mending practices directly fed into my eventual upcycling. I had also developed my fabric construction skills over time, learning from members of my community. Therefore, messages of taking care, rewearing and repairing are placed over this fabric to construe this ethos of upcycling to people who are interested in the pouch. Using upcycling to create practical items like this pouch shows the value of repairing and reusing items, rather than throwing things away!

I made this pouch from an old denim jacket that I had cropped. I screen-printed some text onto the denim directly and onto other fabric scraps from old clothing that I save to use in clothing repair. I received the screen-printing ink from a neighbor who was throwing it away. The QR code patch was transferred to the fabric using transfer paper and links to a website that I created with funding from the Simpson Center (Barclay Simpson Fellow 2023) to look into fast fashion commodity chains. Other patches include a heart I created using yarn leftover from a knitting project, using a punch needle and some canvas fabric. The embroidered flower was also left over from another project. All of the patches add decoration to the pouch and make it look purposeful. The only new item purchased for this project was the zipper at the top of the pouch, because I did not have one in my stash of recycled textiles.