Guide to Sustainable Sewing

A technique-led guide to creating new items to wear and to decorate your home, using fabric scraps from other crafting and sewing projects, discarded home textiles, and used clothing. Wendy Ward teaches you all the skills and techniques you need to refashion garments and reuse fabric from existing pieces you already own, plus ways to use up your leftover scraps to make useful and beautiful household items, and to customize your clothes. Each chapter focusses on a different technique, for instance using small fabric pieces for appliqué and patchwork, larger fabric pieces to make pieced household linens such as tablecloths and curtains, and ways to recycle clothing including dyeing, inserting panels, and combining two garments into one.

The "zero waste" chapter shows you how to make simple garments from pieced (patchwork) fabric, and there's a useful chapter on mending techniques, which can be decorative as well as functional. Wendy also covers the ethical issues involved in buying new, from shopping locally to choosing your fibre carefully and supporting small businesses and other crafters. Each section includes projects using the techniques covered—a total of 20 makes that can be adapted to the materials you have to hand.