Friday, November 13, 2009

Recylced, er, ummm... Re-Vamped!



Here in Portland, a great new design line has formed, called Looptworks - they have come up with another way to be resourceful with things we already have by salvaging the scraps, remnants and overages from other clothing companies!  Cool!  I love this - I've done this many-a-time with some of my fabric after making something else - one thing I started to make was an interactive baby book where there are little things to learn how to do like zipping a zipper and snapping a snap.  Looptworks price points are pretty spendy compared with Target, etc. but compare to similar new items you'd find at Nordstrom or Macy's, but, when armed with a sewing machine and some scissors (or even that Mighty Mend-It stuff, if you are not the sewing type!), you could come up with some new fashions from your old!
Although slightly different concept, I've successfully recycled some of my children's clothes in the past!  One thing I did was to cut the onesie bottom off with pinking shears and VOILA - a Tee-shirt!  This didn't work with all of the onsies I tried it on, just the ones that were longer. A pair of pants my daughter wore when she was 1 1/2 is still in action as some cute capri's - I just pulled out the elastic, which made the waist larger (it has belt loops, so she wears a belt with it).  I covered flowers on my daughter's old shirts and a couple pairs of pants with fabric scraps cut into different sized squares and made an abstract design sewn on to cover the girly features so my son can wear the clothes!  Turn pants with holes in the knees into shorts - for girls, you can attach a ruffle or fabric band or ribbon at the bottom, for boys, hem them or leave them rough (but don't cut too short or they'll look too girly!).  I also made my baby's Halloween costume - a spider - from old black socks suffed with other socks and then I attached them on him, drew some paper cartoonish eyes and taped them onto a black ski mask I had!  Another fun thing is to make sweat bands (or stylish accessory) from sock tops (just cut the whole foot part off and fold it like you would fold the top of a sock, and sew the raw edge and hide the raw edge).  Kept newborn clothes for use as doll clothes.  Fabric scraps also make great Barbie clothes or doll clothes!  Of course, there's the old Sock Puppet project too!  If your old clothes are not nice enough to give to the Goodwill, cut out the zipper and buttons, etc. and save them for either future clothes you make, or for the cute learning book idea I talked about above (if they're in good working order, that is!).

What other ideas do you have for recycling/re-purposing your, or your child's clothes?

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