Tag Archives: wool

Sew 54 – Wool for winter comfort

This plum outfit is from op shop wool separates linked by scarf pieces hand sewn with vintage buttons to dress up skirt.

Wool drapes beautifully, is comfortable and toasty warm in cold weather. Merino wool is particularly soft, with amazingly superfine wool being produced in cooler parts of the nation.

Athough Australia no longer rides on the sheep’s back, it still leads the world in wool production by supplying high-quality natural fibre for the world of high-fashion in Europe and the bourgeoning Chinese market.

The National Farmers Federation website says total production of wool in Australia was 368,330 tonnes (greasy) in 2011, with wool exports valued at $3.047 billion and major markets for Australian wool being China ($2.2 billion), India ($209 million) and Italy ($178 million). Continue reading →

Sew 52 – History Skirt from jumpers

This history skirt is refashioned from pieces of eight wool jumpers, with another jumper as waistband and hem.

Being winter in the northern hemisphere, I’m doing some woolly upcycles since there’s growing interest in sewitagain.com from United Kingdom, Italy and United States.

Nothing is ever entirely original in this world it just evolves from something or somewhere. In his book Think! Before It’s Too Late, Edward De Bono says the human brain is designed to set up routine patterns and to use and follow these patterns.

He says all valuable creative ideas will be logical in hindsight. Creativity is not a mysterious gift or special talent – it is the behaviour of a self-organising information system that makes asymmetric patterns (the brain). Continue reading →

Sew 46 – One from the gestational file

This orange and black stripped outfit once was a woollen jumper which I’ve turned into a jumper-skirt with sleeves as a neck scarf, teamed with a wool top.

It’s from my files because I was distracted at the Rural Press Club, catching up with journo mates such as Jane Paterson, Steve Gray, Gordon Collie, Teena Girdis, Neroli Roocke and meeting new ones Sue Neales from The Australian and Cassandra Hough from ABC Toowoomba, respectively runner-up and winner of the Excellence in Rural Reporting awards.

The link between the rural sector and what I’m doing here with Sew it Again is not immediately obvious until you think about where your clothes come from. They’re either made from natural farmed resources (wool, cotton, flax, hemp, alpaca etc) or man-made from petroleum, oil or gas.

After the Rural Press Club I went to Avid Reader bookshop in West End to pick up my newly-arrived copy of The Sustainable Fashion Handbook by Sandy Black (I just had to have my own copy), bumped into my dear friend Kay Pearse who is off to the US tomorrow, and then it was time to pick up Darcy from a city meeting and on to the airport to pick up son Max.

A fun day but no time at home feeding the baby – model Mabel needed a change of clothes! Continue reading →