Every day we eat and we dress. We know fresh, varied, nutritious meals enable us to survive and thrive as human beings but the recent series The Men Who Made Us Fat unmasked the shocking truth about our consumption habits. We are over fed while under nourished. This British documentary by Jacques Peretti exposes how corporations devise tactics to sell us more and more unhealthy addictive processed food. Two-thirds of us are overweight and at risk of chronic diseases. This downward spiral of socially irresponsible businesses exploiting human weaknesses and addictions for commercial gain is disturbing. 

In the same way our food intake is manipulated by commercial interests, our clothing wants are too. We allow ourselves to be victims of fashion trends, constantly feeling the need to have the latest greatest so we keep up with the Jones and look sharp. Yet we often feel dissatisfied and need to shop for more.

The extent of clothing waste in the name of fashion is astounding, and my Sew it Again project is a simple effort to demonstrate what we can do as individuals to reuse existing natural fibre clothing. Used clothing is not waste – it is resource that can be harvested and reused in imaginative and creative ways when you have the skills and allow time and space to do so.

According to textile recycler USAgain, textile consumption in the United States has increased five-fold since 1980. “This means that every man, woman and child now buys more than 81 pounds (37 kgs) of textiles every year. This includes 66 pounds (29 kgs) of clothes, footwear, towels, sheets and pillowcases, of which about 10 pounds (4.5kgs) will be reused or recycled, leaving 56 pounds (25kgs) to be thrown in the trash.”

To bring attention to these scary statistics and stop so much clothing ending up in landfill, USAgain created this #NotTrashy rendition of the Pharrell Williams song Happy.

We can easily adapt clothing that already exists into something unique and suited to our own shape by using imagination and a few simple sewing skills. For Sew 158, I turned a pair of unworn cotton flared tights into a scarf by removing the elastic, sewing the former waistband together to disguise and mend small holes, and it now works well as a scarf. The unworn viscose top becomes a comfortable skirt when you cut it along the shoulders then finish this cut edge by zigzagging a binding tape (I just used a strip of cotton) to prevent fraying. I ran the binding across the shoulder edges so they are rejoined and form a side-feature on the skirt. Using a trick from upcycler colleague Karen Ellis of #scavengerstyle in Victoria, I threaded hat elastic through the knitted fabric and knotted it to hold the waist securely and easily, So simple.