Making for wellbeing interviews in New Zealand

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Making is important for wellbeing and mending brings joy and meditative calming. These are the messages from people I’ve met while travelling to Auckland, New Zealand, as part of my eight-week Churchill Fellowship research. I’ve been posting regularly on Instagram @textilebeat on the topic of how being hands-on with our clothes can help reduce textile waste and enhance wellbeing. I’ve recorded conversations which are posted on youtube and shared below.

Educator and designer Karishma Kelsey

Amongst her many talents, Karishma Kelsey @karishmadesign teaches the politics of style including her lifelong belief that anything is everything, everything is anything. As part of my Churchill Fellowship meetings, we talked about her @miraculous_me_movt style activism and philosophy: your body is your canvass; creativity is your birthright; the superpowers of colour energies and following your intuition. Karishma believes in the joy and meditative qualities of mending and creating.

Botanical dyer Melissa Pentecost-Spargo Continue Reading →

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Mendful, mindful stitches

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Mended garments carry a story of care. They reflect the triumph of imperfection over pretension while the act of mending itself brings transformation in both mender and mended.

By embracing repair as a valid and useful act we, the menders, are stitching new life-energy into something others step over in the scrabble onwards and upwards. To pause, apply creative problem-solving and add a mark of care to our clothes, we extend their life and bring meaning to our own.

The clothes we wear are a statement of values. We may go through stages of searching for newer, sharper images and think clothes, like makeup and leopard spots, can camouflage and attract the right sort of attention. Alas, the pipe dream.  Continue Reading →

Posted in: clothing waste, consumption issues, Fashion Revolution, leadership, lifestyle, reuse, Sew it Again, slow clothing \ Tagged: , , , , , ,

Slow clothing philosophy

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Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. Using observation and instinct, Jane Milburn and Textile Beat join the dots and explore a science-based narrative about clothing.

Clothes do for us on the outside what food does on the inside – they nourish and warm our body and soul. In the same way that conscious eaters are sourcing fresh whole food and returning to the kitchen, conscious dressers are seeking to know more about the provenance and ethics of clothing and curious about how it is made. Every day we eat and we dress to survive and thrive, and it is not just the style that matters, substance does too.

War on Waste interview with Craig Reucassel web

War on Waste with Craig Reucassel, coming to ABC TV in 2017

Fast and processed industrial food has had a dramatic impact on our health in recent years and similarly there has been transformational shift to industrial factory-made clothing, the social and environmental impacts of which we are only now coming to understand.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that at least one-third of food produced is never eaten and creative solutions are emerging to divert and reduce that waste. In the same way, there is growing evidence a third of clothing is wasted, with much potential to upcycle and redeploy it. My purposeful work is bringing awareness to these and other material issues.

More than 90 percent of garments sold in Australia are now made overseas, mostly in Asian factories. Most people buy off-the-rack or online, with very few making anything for themselves to wear. As a natural-fibre champion, I am troubled that synthetic fibres made from petroleum now dominate the clothing market at a time when research shows these plastic clothes are shedding millions of microplastic particles into the ecosystem with every wash.

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Eclectic sustainable style – Kate Fletcher

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Kate Fletcher from Tasmania has been involved with making and recycling clothing as long as she can remember. For the past 10 years she has organised a sustainable clothing show at the Local Sustainable Living event in Hobart, motivated by growing awareness of the environmental and social impacts of the global clothing industry.

Tasmania's Kate Fletcher wears her story-filled garment hand-stitched as part of The Slow Clothing Project

Tasmania’s Kate Fletcher wears her story-filled garment hand-stitched for The Slow Clothing Project

Kate’s individual style is influenced by people at home and abroad, many of whom she is connected with through the volunteer program Willing Workers on Organic Farms.

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