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Hello! I am Chloe Calendula and welcome to my little corner of the internet where I share my work making zines, mending clothing, and creating other crafts with upcycled materials.
What are Zines?
Zines :: Are handmade, self published booklets and – unlike magazines and books – can be made by anyone with a message, a bit of artistic vision, and access to a printer. Zines also have the benefit of being as short or as long as the creator wishes and can cover any subject matter and be of any style, much unlike traditional publishing.
At the moment I have a few of my & my partner’s handmade publications for sale as well as butterfly prints and botanical stationary:
Why are Upcycling and Mending Important?
For those of us living on a small income, buying from sustainable fashion brands is often out of reach. I would like to point out that *buying new but ecological garments isn’t the only way to cultivate a slow fashion wardrobe*. Here are a few options for transforming *upcycling* your clothing, thus making fast fashion into slow fashion:
- Mend and repair :: patch hand-me-down sweaters, fix holes in leggins from target and other department stores. By giving items a longer life, and preventing unnecessary garbage, fast fashion items become slow fashion! Here are two tutorials I have written on Tumblr about how to mend a torn belt loop on jeans and patch leggings.
- Up-cycle clothing that doesn’t suit your style :: when preparing for a trip back home and wondering how to acquire some nicer clothing for the trip a friend of mine gifted me a big bag of clothes. Almost all of them were items that we could call “fast fashion” and nearly all also had stains or rips that needed mending. By fixing and adapting these items and then going on to wear them for several years longer, I am keeping them out of the cycle of buy then trash.
- Tailor items that don’t fit you :: Taking in clothing is quite simple and there are lots of tutorials on how to hem pants and skirts or take in a size or two. I recently made a tutorial on how to take out a skirt, or make a skirt bigger by adding panels.
At some point, we must face the fact that a t-shirt is totally worn out and cannot be used for clothing any longer. In such cases here are a couple of crafts to utilize the fabric and other items from the scrap pile:
- Create a Quilt :: if you find yourself with a pile of beautiful & memory-filled scraps — transform them into a quilt as I have done in this post.
- Make Twine :: Longer scraps of fabric, especially those from stretch materials like leggings or jersey cotton t-shirts can be made into a thing rope also known as fabric twine. I wrote a tutorial on how to make twine out of fabric scraps.
If mending and slow fashion are new to you and a tad bit overwhelming, I have created sewing kits in a variety of patterns that can help get you on the right path.
