Written on February 19, 2016, our journey imported from our old website <3
Creative reincarnation in a sense, finding new life for fabrics has been a passion of mine since sewing beanie baby clothes from my mother’s upholstery scraps as a child. After she taught me machine sewing, I mishmashed dresses from my brother’s old hockey jerseys in highschool. Flipped first avenue street rags into bodycon garments in college then convinced Kenneth Cole to donate their production scraps to A.Bernadette at my first (corporate) job. It’s always made sense. A fabric’s past life doesn’t detract from its usefulness, despite what fast fashion’s ever-mutating dialogues might have us believe.
A shared interest or just a lucky guess for the introduction? I’ll never know. Either way, the Sri Aurobindo handmade paper shop in Pondicherry mixes old textiles together (primarily cottons) and makes them into beautiful paper products. So, they keep fabrics from landfills and save trees- and I’m in love with them. Win win win.
I’m not sure why more people don’t do this. We have an abundance of unwanted fabric (#fastfashion) and a shortage of trees. True to form, The Mother and Sri Aurobindo were thinkers before their time- and still remain revolutionary despite the strong legacy they’ve left behind.
