The world is facing a fast-fashion epidemic. Less than 1% of the material used to produce clothing is recycled into new textiles and fibres ( Elle MacArthur Foundation 2017 ). This patchwork project is my small contribution to recycling. I find clothing labels uncomfortable. Usually, I remove these skin-irritating blighters from my clothes the first time I wear them because of this.
Over the past few years, I’ve been stockpiling the labels from my clothes. Once I had enough* tags I pinned them down on a piece of scrap fabric ( approximately A5 in size ). I didn’t apply any particular rhyme or reason to the layout. Using my sewing machine I sewed the labels down with a mixture of straight stitch and zig-zag stitch. I did swap between white thread for white labels and black thread for black/grey labels because I thought that would look best.
It was only when I had the rectangle covered in labels that I decided it might make an interesting purse. I pulled a zip and some scrap fabric from my stash and proceeded to combine the lot into the very basic rectangular zip-up purse you see in the photos above.
*enough = an undefined number of tags that I randomly decided would be sufficient to cover a single sheet approximately A5 in size.
