A sewathon to engage citizens in upcycling their clothes

City

Cardiff

Engagement strategy

Awareness campaign

Sector focus

Textile

Circular principle

Encourage learning and experimentation

CITY CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVE

In partnership with Oxfam, a ‘Sewathon’ was held for one day where volunteers and fashion design students upcycled unwanted jeans into stylish cut-off shorts for Oxfam to sell at summer music festivals. The event set out to promote Oxfam’s Boutique store in to provide public engagement experience for Cardiff and Vale Cardiff, to engage young people and university students College Fashion Design students to add to their portfolio. with messages around upcycling and repairing clothes and to provide public engagement experience for Cardiff and Vale Cardiff, to engage young people and university students College Fashion Design students to add to their portfolio.

 

DESCRIPTION OF THE INITIATIVE

An all-day ‘Sewathon’ was held for local people to help shape the look of the summer festival season by refashioning, sewing, embellishing, and transforming jeans into cut-off shorts. The upcycled shorts were sold on Oxfam stalls at major music festivals, including Glastonbury, Bestival, Boomtown and Womad.  The Oxfam Boutique store in Cardiff collected unwanted jeans donated to the store a few months ahead of the event as well as fabric scraps, lace, ribbon and broken jewellery.

A press release was issued to local media to promote the event and encourage people to sign up to volunteer an hour of their time to design and create the shorts. Information was also sent out to local organisations such as universities, colleges, crafting societies, bloggers, Visit Cardiff and local volunteering organisations.

Cardiff and Vale College’s Fashion Design lecturer supported the event by encouraging her students to volunteer their time to design shorts and provide them with valuable experience to add to their work experience portfolios.

Bespoke tags were created for the ‘Sewathon’ for each person to add to the shorts they created with details of who made them and what the event was about. A crafting expert was on hand at the event to offer help and advice to people taking part. There were also subsequent denim upcycling workshops held to use the remainder of the jeans so that nothing was wasted. These were run by the crafting expert in the same venue on the following two days.

 

WHO’S INVOLVED?

Oxfam, city of Cardiff

 

MORE INFO

Love your clothes campaign

 

 

 

 

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