Newspaper dress
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Top 10!
HUUUUGE thanks to Green My Style for voting Wardrobe Refashion as one of their top 10 Ethical websites!
Featured Refashionista - Susan Italo
Susan Italo of Wild Onion Studios is an award winning pattern designer who incorporates a wide range of refashion techniques into her wearable art. In fact, this environmentally-friendly bent infuses her entire family life. In this interview, she shares her approach, inspiration, and tips for integrating eco-conscious principles into family life.
1. Who are you, and where are you from?
My name is Susan Conn Italo, of Wild Onion Studio. I currently live in Southern California, but I originally come from Chicago, IL. While I miss the multi-cultural activities of the big city, the light and warmth of my new sunny home is very inspiring! Had I stayed in Chicago, I also wouldn’t have the cool studio name, since “Wild Onion” is the translation of “Chicago”, and as you can imagine, there are a lot of “Wild Onion” businesses listed in the Chicago phone book. Out here, I’m unique!
2. Tell us a little bit more about your refashioning activities.
If I am emotionally attached to an article of clothing, I have a difficult time letting it go of it. This is when I take it to my studio and refashion! I have several tubs of such clothing, waiting to be reborn. I sort through the tubs often, because you never know when inspiration will strike!
3. How did you get into refashioning?
I have a long torso, so I did a lot of tee shirt and sweater refashioning when short tops were in vogue. I couldn’t buy “off the rack” without looking rather indecent! For a quick tee re-fashion, I took some of my husband’s tee shirts, and revamped them with flowers and curvy side seams. One of my tee shirt re-fashions was featured in Altered Couture magazine.
4. I understand your entire family follows this (creative) reuse ethos. Can you tell us a little more about that?
I’ve always been interested in the concept “reduce, reuse, recycle”. For a long time, I just thought I was cheap! Now I realize that being thrifty with our resources, eating locally, and trying not to overburden our environment is a healthy, responsible way to live. My website is also green; my server’s offices and data centers offset 100% of their energy use with wind-generated Renewable Engergy Certificates.
My husband owns a recycling business, eCycle Group, which specializes in recycling printer cartridges, cell phones, and other small electronics on a local and global level.
My oldest son was the CEO of “Tee Bags”, a business that sold shopping bags made from recycled tee shirts. When I blogged about his technique, the post was picked up all over the world. So he is actually better known than anyone else in the family! My younger son wants everyone to know that he is anti- plastic grocery bags; he contributes to the cause by decorating my cloth bags with fabric pens and paint.
5. Do you have any tips for other families looking to integrate reuse and recycling into their family lives, or activities with children?
Families are so busy with school and activities that it can become overwhelming to think about adding more responsibilities to a bulging schedule. Start with a small recycling committment, and stick with it. When I decided to stop using plastic shopping bags, I made a pact with myself that if I forgot my cloth bags in the car, I would force myself to walk back out to the parking lot and retrieve them before checking out. After a few times of enforced marching, I got better at remembering to bring in my cloth bags! I bring them into stores other than the grocery, too.
Eat locally grown produce at least once or twice a week. The amount of fossil fuel saved by not importing your meal from across the country is staggering! Of course, living in Southern California, I am spoiled by the abundant, year-round availability of produce. As my sister pointed out, locally grown produce available in January is usually snow.
Clothing is so abundant in this country; walk into any thrift store, and you can be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of people’s cast offs. Look at those articles with an open mind. What can you make from a pair of floral pants? Can that sweater be felted and turn into your winter handbag? Can you use the polar fleece blanket with the fraying hem as the lining for a jacket?
Clothing in our own homes is also abundant. I made a conscious decision to keep my drawer storage to a minimum. If I want to buy something new, I have to donate something old; I simply do not have extra drawer space! I do this for every family member, too. Why do my kids need more than 10 tee shirts? They don’t!
6. How would you describe your style?
I live in comfortable clothes, which have to take me from shaking kids awake in the morning, to bedtime reading at night. When my husband commented several years ago that I should dress more like an artist, I decided to wear my own re-fashions every day. I’m a pretty bold person, so that works for me. When I’m teaching or attending a gallery opening, I wear one of my more formal Trapped Fiber garments made out of silk reclaimed from a factory in Nepal.
7. What inspires you and/or the garments that you make?
As a fiber artist and longarm quilter, I work mainly with monochromatic colors, and a trapped fiber technique. Lately, I have been bringing my fine art techniques into the world of re-fashion. My Wild Onion Jacket Pattern Series features simple to construct shapes; using one of the patterns as a starting base, I’ll use motifs culled from tee shirts, fabric, or children’s bedsheets to collage interesting designs. I’m getting ready to publish a new pattern, called the Wild Onion Shrug. Using some tee shirts from my studio tubs, I recently wove a Wild Onion Shrug that is comfy and fashionable.
I’m kind of obsessed with tee shirts at the moment, actually. At the end of the school year, I was presented with a huge box of misprinted school tees. I spent a week cutting and sewing them into shopping bags for the kids to sell as a fundraiser. I kept all of the chopped off sleeves and hems, and over-dyed them. I’ve used some of this in a new wall hanging, called “Edge”, that I am entering into a fiber art show at the Museum of Ventura County. Fashion isn’t just for wearing!
8. Tell us about your favorite refashion.
My favorite re-fashion is a skirt called “Doris is a Diva”. I belong to a fiber art group called Fibervision, and we issue a yearly challenge. One year, we each put an unfinished, unloved fiber art piece into a brown bag, and passed the bags around the group. No one knew what she was going to find inside her bag, but other than creating a new work using the old work, there were no rules. I received a small pieced work, featuring a stylized tulip in a vase. I immediately saw the flower as a crown, with the upside down stem and leaves as the body of a woman. That woman became Doris, a diva who celebrates her birthday every day, and likes to eat dessert first. She lives on a skirt I made from a pair of pants. I painted, beaded, and embellished the skirt, adding Doris’ credo in copper metallic paint. At the end of the re-fashion, there was a 1” square of original fiber art left over! I love wearing Doris-- she makes me smile every time I put her on.
Wardrobe Refashion on The Storque
I'm featured on The Storque over on Etsy. Check it out :)
Giveaway -- Crochet Adorned!
After reading several reviews of Crochet Adorned: Reinvent Your Wardrobe with Crocheted Accents, Embellishments, and Trims, I have been growing more and more excited about this book. Written by Linda Permann, a writer and crochet designer who was the founding Craft and Decorating Editor of Adorn magazine, this book walks readers through the ins and outs of adding crochet embellishments to clothing, creating accessories, and making beautiful yet functional household items. I would love to see more yarn arts incorporated into the creativity that comes out of this blog, so imagine how thrilled I was when Linda agreed to a book review and giveaway on Wardrobe Refashion!
This book is the perfect handbook for any refashionista looking to add some flair to their wardrobe, or veteran knitters and crocheters looking to use up their scrap yarn. For those new to crocheting, Linda provides a comprehensive introduction including yarn choice, hook sizes, and clear instructions with plenty of diagrams for all the basic stitches. For those with a little more experience under their belts, she provides over 100 different trims, stitches and motifs at the back of the book, so that you can customize projects or create one-of-a-kind patterns to your hearts’ content. She also provides tips on attaching embellishments to clothing, what types of garments work best, substituting yarns, etc.. Linda does note that these may need delicate treatment in the wash, but that modern acrylic yarns and blends both hold up well and feel smooth to the touch.
What I love best about this book is that it offers a fast, fun and colorful starting point for jazzing up clothing. Whether working with items from the thrift shop, clothes sucked into a black hole at the bottom of your closet, or fabrics from the stash, she offers a range of projects for all skill levels. The projects themselves truly are starting points; check out this lovely pillow that Erin made, inspired by the Scalloped Spring Jacket:
Or how about this lovely tunic, or this great dress with crochet trim:
On Wardrobe Refashion, in the past we’ve seen several projects that use crochet to lengthen sweaters or widen sleeves, but just imagine how other garments or accessories could be refashioned with these techniques. Armed with the stitch dictionary at the back of the book, the possibilities are endless.
To win a copy of this book, please leave a comment here telling us what you would most like to embellish with crochet. Comments will be open until September 18, 12PM EST, and we’ll randomly draw a winner.
Plastic Fantastic!
Living Creatively are running a competition in which you must use up all those plastic grocery bags that you inevitably accumulate no matter how hard you try to only use your green bags. Head on over there to find out more information.
The competition runs until October 2nd.
National Sewing Month
National Sewing Month started in 1982 with a proclamation from the president Ronald Regan declaring September as national sewing month "In recognition of the importance of home sewing to our nation".
They have a Reuse, Remake, Restyle challenge happening right now, perfect for us refashionistas! Head on over there to find out more about entering.
Sydney Stitches and Craft Show
We had a ball at the Sydney Stitches and Craft Show! The Reconstruction Zone was buzzing the whole week with sewers new and old. Some fo you may ask "What is the Reconstruction Zone?" Well, it's an area we set up with sewing machines, old clothes and fabric scraps and supplies such as buttons, ribbons, zips, needles, threads, fabric glue, trims and much more. People are invited to use the facilities to create something which they can then take home with them and this is all FREE!! It was amazing to see people give sewing a go for the first time and how happy they were with their creations, this is a big part of what Wardrobe Refashion is all about, to just jump on in and give it a go and most of all enjoy the process.
A HUGE thanks to the following:
- Those of you who sent your outfits to be included in the fashion parade, these will be returned to you next month.
- My volunteers who helped out at the show, i coudn't have done it without you!
- Brother for kindly supporting the Reconstruction Zone and supplying sewing machines and overlockers
- Hemline for supporting the Reconstruction Zone by kindly donating notions, trims and heaps more!
- Beutron for supporting the reconstruction Zone by kindly donating buttons
- And most of all i'd like to thank Angela and Ross for taking over the Stitches and Craft Show and breathing some new life into it! They support us crafty folk and do a wonderful job in helping us have a place to showcase our wares and ideas, we need to support them too!
We'll be there!
