A new sewing project… recycled dungerees!

A new sewing project… recycled dungerees!

Have you ever felt guilty buying those throw away clothes that you wore once and stuffed back into the cupboard? I do! I am also a horder, so I have many such items! I decided I wanted to see if I could re-cycle some of the fabric into other things, so got thinking about what to make.

Making a pattern

So far, I’ve not quite worked out how to recycle the clothes I’ve already bought, but watch this space for those projects! But what I did do, was create some clothes out of other pieces of fabric I had acumalated over the years.

I found some old shoe packaging paper and patched it together with sellotape. I used other clothes as a basic layout and mashed it all together to make a basic dungeree pattern.

First attempt at dungerees

Once I put it together, I was pretty amazed at how easy it was and I was pretty pleased with the outcome, so decided to share in social media.
I had a lot of interest in them which was great, so I have decided to make myself a little mini-business from it, when I’m not freelancing.

The first job was to source old materials, I want to create re-purposed clothing if possible, but will also use new fabrics occasionally when I find interesting designs. I love african prints and my sister doesn’t know it yet, but I’ll be getting her to bring me some back on her trips out there!

Old african printed fabric dungerees – modelled by Phousa

So, I enlisted my friend’s Lucy & Sarah to trapse around multiple charity shops with me, in search of interesting fabrics. It turns out this is pretty difficult, as not many charity shops sell fabric and some charge quite a lot, I found some lovely curtain fabric in one shop for 50p and the exact same curtains in another for £10! But now, I have a small list of those shops which sell fabric at a decent price. I now also intend to go to carboot sales and jumble sales in search of old curtains, sheets, duvet covers and the like!

Repurposed Thomas the Tank Engine duvet cover! Modelled by Phousa & Taz


Here are some of the designs I have created so far, I had fun creating the adult sized Thomas the Tank engine ones!

I took them to my roller derby team to see what they looked like on different sized people and was amazed that I sold one already! It will be a challenge to make them for the different body shapes, but I love a challenge!

Am thinking of doing short versions for the summer and maybe some skirts too.

Add me on Instagram to see what re-purposed things I manage to create!

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