How to make Clothes out of Recycled materials
March 18, 2024If you are wondering how to make clothes out of recycled materials, that’s a fantastic question. You’ve come to the right place for answers!
The fashion industry, as we know, is a beautiful but wasteful monster. Fashion brands championing eco friendly sustainable clothing made from recycled fabric, post consumer waste, recycled plastic bottles, recycled polyester, recycled cotton, and the like are doing their best, but it is possible to make your own sustainable fashion with recycled clothing.
There are several options. You can make new clothes out of old clothes you’ve already got. Some people make new clothes out of old clothes from charity shops. You can repair or alter your old clothes and make them like new. Or, you can use newly manufactured recycled fabric. It depends on what skills you feel like exercising, what resources you have, and what end result you fancy.
How to make Clothes out of Recycled Materials – What are the Options?
Many denim. Recycled Vintage Clothing Online North London. Image via Wikimedia
Jcjeansandclothes, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I love to give my old clothes a new lease of life. This is one of the cheapest options in creating an environmentally conscious new look. You can do that in many different ways.
If your clothing is fine, with no holes, fading, stains or damage, but you’re bored of it, how about some embroidery? For this, you will need some embroidery thread or wool, needles, and maybe a backing fabric and embroidery hoop to make clothes out of recycled materials. If your clothing is made from denim, you can embroider straight on to the fabric itself. You need a sturdy needle, and let’s be honest, quite sturdy fingers plus a thimble. Denim is thick and great for holding its shape without wrinkling or puckering while you embroider. But this means you need to put some vim into pushing the needle through. I love it though, and think it’s a great way to brighten up a plain pair of jeans. It’s really easy to find patterns online or sketch your own, and a few colours of embroidery thread won’t set you back much.
Mending Jeans
Wide circle denim skirt from Blue17 vintage clothing
If your jeans have holes in them, use an iron-on patch on the back first. You can then embroider over the top. You can get denim patches in matching colours (faded blue or dark blue) for this reason, or just use plain black or white if you are going to cover it with a design. As well as distinct designs for clothes made from recycled materials, you can do visible mending on it. This is when you darn or freeform stitches on the shredded or damaged parts. They are intended to hold the fabric together in a practical fashion.
But instead of choosing something that just blends in with the background, you can do a design that’s intended to be seen. Show off your skills! On blue denim, I like the look of white stitches. But you can choose whatever delights your eyes on that day. Hot pink and orange, for example. Look at Japanese sachiko stitches for inspiration.
If you prefer to plan out your designs first or have something more portable, you can make small motifs on plain white cotton. Use an embroidery hoop to pull it taught. With this, you can make finer creations with more subtle and accurate stitches. Once you have your embroidery, you can cut it out and stitch it in place. You can make several and join them all together in a final design.
How to make Clothes out of Recycled Materials – Subtlety
oriental print vintage fabric
You can also go with plain old traditional invisible mending. This is where you try to be as subtle as possible. Match the thread to the colour of the hole you are using. Match the backing fabric as closely as possible, too. You can even use a snippet of the garment itself, for example, cut a little off the turn up of the trousers or part of an inside pocket or wide seam. The King of England has this done to his old suits. He wears them for decades and has them mended. So elegant.
Where to get the Equipment and Supplies?
Machine Embroidery Image from Blue17 vintage fabrics archive.
If you want to know how to make clothes out of recycled materials from scratch, you can either cut up old clothing or buy new fabric made from recycled materials. A really hot tip is to look for duvet covers, sheets , throws and curtains. They provide yards and yards of fabric. Sometimes you might be lucky enough to find someone’s stash of fabric which they never used and gave away. It’s the same for knitting wool and embroidery cotton, too. People take up a hobby and buy all the stuff then never use and you could be the lucky benefactor in this!
To make clothes out of recycled materials, cutting up old clothes is good too, but because the fabric is already cut into different shapes, you will probably just get enough to make something smaller than the original. For example, you could make a hat out of an old jacket.
Denim, Denim, Denim…
2002 Junya Watanabe for Comme des Garçons jacket, blue denim jeans patchwork.
Staff photographer for the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Or if you wanted, you could patchwork different pieces together. Denim is particularly good for this. (Sorry for sounding like an ad for denim!). All the lovely different tones of blue harmonise beautifully so you can get fabric from lots of different jeans, for example, and sew then up to make a new piece of continuous fabric. To make clothes out of recycled materials then you can cut that new sheet to shape.
It is also possible to buy recycled fabric for sewing projects. Fleece fabric made from recycled bottles is easily available. From this, you can make hoodies, dog coats and hat linings, or anything you’d normally make out of fleece. Recycled denim is also available. How to make clothes out of recycled materials with fleece and denim, you can just buy these two online by the metre, you don’t have to go to a specialist shop. If you want to buy fabric by the metre that is a little bit more eco conscious, you can also get organically grown cotton jersey for t-shirts and leisure wear. Remaking fabric in a factory does take more energy and water than reusing old fabric that’s already been made though.
