Experiment | Can we restyle post consumer textile into camouflage designs for our greenwall design.
Thanks to | Goud Goed, post-consumer textile collecting in the City of Groningen
Photography | Ronald Zijlstra
In the city of Groningen post-consumer textile waste is collected and sorted. A small percentage of this clothing, footwear, fashion accessories, towels, bedding, and drapery is good enough to be sold second hand. What is left will be stored to be converted into fibres to make new fabric or industrial felt and insulation material but, the vast majority is going into landfill.
Making yarn and new fabric from waste textile is a beautiful but complicated way to upcycle. We want to use the woven fabric that is still of good quality, and restyle and repurpose it. The company that collects and separates the post-consumer textile supplied us with a 400+kilogram bale of post-consumer cotton. Going through this pile we took out all the textile in which we could fit the Quilt Garden pattern. These where all sorts of items like tablecloths, bedding, shirts and curtains.
We are using our knowledge of natural dying to restyle the fabric into camouflage patterns and make it into a natural backdrop for the vegetation of the Quilt Garden. I have to say it is quite an artistic way of working, because every fabric reacts differently to the dying process and the colour patterns turn out quite unique.
