To draw an analogy from nature, when you apply right-brained creative thinking to traditional sewing skills it is like undergoing metamorphosis. You can transform yourself and mediocre garments into something bespoke.

What I most enjoyed about the Biloela upcycling workshop was enabling willing and able women to make a chop of faith and change their garments – and in some ways themselves – forever more.

It is not particularly hard or risky when you use reject and unworn clothing that isn’t working for you any more as it was anyway. And once your creative right-brain switches on to the potential of upcycling, there’s no end to what you can do when you invest time and energy in a mindfully creative way. 

Having refashioning skills is liberating, exciting even. You can take charge of your wardrobe needs, supplementing with new purchases without being entirely dependent upon them for the rest of your lifetime.

Among the items Rosanne brought along to the weekend workshop were a pair of blue denim shorts and a black cotton frilled skirt – and these morphed into an original skirt incorporating the top of the shorts and the bottom of the skirt. After Rosanne cut off the short legs we realised she had cut just below the back pockets leaving no fabric for a seam. Mistakes often become design features and all she had to do was unpick the bottom few centimetres of the pockets, attach the new skirt, then overlap and sew the pockets back in place for a more integrated refashion. The black skirt was a bigger circumference than the denim, so as Roseanne sewed them together, she pleated the excess at one side and then hand-stitched various buttons to make this a feature. An offcut of the black skirt was stitched together to become a tie belt. Easy as – and tomorrow Sew 169 will feature what Roseanne did with the denim and black cotton left-over from this project.