Taekwondo is a really big deal in our house and has been for the last four years ever since Buddy saw a class through a window and was instantly hooked. If you ask me about what Taekwondo means to Buddy I will probably cry. It’s not something I talk about online, but he struggles with severe often crippling anxiety, and out of all the things we have done to help him, Taekwondo has done the most. It’s a combination of the philosophy behind the art as well as amazing mentoring instructors, and I can’t recommend this incredible martial art enough. His strong desire to practice this martial art m ..read more

Every now and then tragedy strikes and one of our samples is damaged. We had a photoshoot a few years ago at a cafe, and after the shoot we noticed some odd bleached sections of on the back of our Dawn shorts sample. I almost cried. I love this sample and knew this fabric wasn’t available anymore. I washed them in the hopes it was just something white on the surface, but to no avail. Our currently running theory is that when our model was perched on the edge of tables that there might have been leftover cleaning liquid? Who knows. But finally I figured out a solution! I love my embroidered ba ..read more

Making your own clothes need not only be about the joy of taking something 2 dimensional and turning it into something 3 dimensional, it can also be about having creative control over the colours and fabric designs you are working with by using plant based dyes. The most addictive and rewarding plant based dyes to try is natural indigo. Using a natural indigo vat to dye cloth and clothing can turn you from a specialist in construction in a specialist in biology, chemistry, and what feels like magic. There are also some good environmental reasons to explore natural indigo as an option. In stand ..read more

This story started when I learnt to weave. After hours of winding thread, stretching it tight and pulling each individual thread through a series of holes on the loom I realised that my lifelong assumption of how cloth is made was wrong. Making cloth from yarn is not as easy as it looks. It takes skill, many years of practice, and time. The second realisation came when I finally came to cutting the cloth from the loom. After hours of preparing the yarn, setting up the loom and then weaving the cloth, there was no way I wanted to cut into the precious cloth! My appreciation for every warp and ..read more

This month we are celebrating Plastic Free July, a monthly long challenge to reduce the amount of plastics we use. What’s that got to do with making clothes you ask? Well, it turns out there’s plastic in our fabric, minute pieces of plastic that will persist in the environment long into the future. So for Plastic Free July we are sharing ways makers can reduce their plastic footprint. How big is the problem? Clothing is the number one source of primary microplastics, contributing to over 34% of the global total.  And the number is set to grow with global production of synthetic ..read more

Organic food labelling and availability has come a long way in the last 10 years and it is highly probably that you know where to find organic produce in your area. Textiles are lagging behind, but as consumers demand more transparency, fashion brands and retailers are looking to source certified products. This trend is slowly trickling through to dress making fabrics. The king of certification schemes is named the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS)  and certified products will be labelled as either “organic” or “made with x% organic.” Fabric certified as organic contains at least 95 ..read more

Textile production has negative impacts on the land, waterways, air, ocean and human health. Efforts to reduce the impacts on the environment and create a fair and equitable system of global production often focus on commercial production. As makers of our own clothing, we might consider ourselves removed from the fast fashion system, but as consumers of cloth our choices are still very much a part of the global textile market. We can make choices that are lighter on the earth. We can make choices that empower workers of farms and mills and we can influence an industry to change from the bott ..read more

I’m so excited to introduce you to a new blog series that will begin next month all about sustainable sewing! If you’ve been following me for a while then you’ll know that issues of environmental and social responsibility are incredibly important to me. I put a lot of work into making environmental and ethically conscious choices in my daily life, and have implemented so many lifestyle changes in the past 6 years, but the area that I find the hardest is in sewing. I love making things but I want to explore what it means to create in a more consciously sustainable manner. // MEET NIC ..read more

Anyone who knows me personally knows that i’m a little bit of a nut about recycling and reusing things. I hate waste. I hate throwing useful things away. I would much rather drive ages out of my way to dispose of something in the best possible way, or find some way to reuse it, or someone who will reuse it, than throw it in the trash. I hate trash. HATE> To me, scrubbing sponges are just trash. Gross trash. I hate sponges, they gross me out, they’re synthetic and they only get used a few times before being thrown in the trash. I also hate fabric scrap waste. I end up with so so many fabric ..read more

I don’t normally post about fabric. But today I am particularly jazzed – so i had to share. Last week whilst on a trip to my favourite underpriced thrift store, I found that someone had donated their entire fabric stash – of UNUSED vintage fabrics STILL WITH THEIR PURCHASE TAGS ON! what?!?!!? freak out! Even better – i got the whole box for $20. I wanted to cry with excitement. It’s so hard to find vintage fabric – I normally have good luck with vintage sheets (which i love working with), but unused fabric? wowza. Almost all the pieces are over 2 yards in length, which leaves me with heaps of ..read more