Or: “It all looked better on Instagram”. Sometimes I get nice ideas for craft sent to me by thoughtful friends. In the past week, both my teen and an Instagram friend sent me this reel, showing how to make buttons from avocado seeds. The reel promised beautiful buttons like these. With avocados in the house, plentiful and cheap, I took this as a sign! The instructions essentially are: Wash the avocado seeds and let them dry so you can peel off the thin skin. Cut the seeds in half longways through their natural line with a very sharp knife, then cut slices. Trim the slices to make smaller butt ..read more

Friends, it’s my pleasure to announce a new pattern that I’ve been chasing for over a year. It’s a sunhat with less than 5% waste. You’ll be able to try this pattern for FREE, as I’m presenting it at the Making Zen Online Retreat, 27th-31st May. Register HERE (this is an affiliate link). Along with the hat sew-a-long, I’ll be discussing the challenge of designing a zero waste hat and the design process for this one. Making Zen is an online event that’s free to attend. 20 artists will present a 30 minute video workshop, four on each day, which will be available to watch for free for 24 hours ..read more

Sharp-eyed readers may notice some similarities between the covers of the books I’ve done: they all have sewing tools on the cover, and some tools feature on all three covers. In particular, The Dressmaker’s Companion and Zero Waste Sewing have a round blue pincushion (the free pattern for which is here). I was very keen to have it again on the newest book, A Year of Zero Waste Sewing. However, the cover is much smaller and there wasn’t enough space. A little look through the “maybe-one-day hexagonal quilt” scrap bag turned up a small amount of the original fabric. I scrunched it into a mock ..read more

When I was a teen in high school in the 1980s, my dad decided that my sister and I should get an annual clothing allowance. Like almost all school students in Australia, we wore a uniform and school shoes, which our parents paid for, so the clothing allowance was for everything else. (Years later, on asking my sister and mum about this, none of us could remember how much this clothing allowance was. Maybe it was $500 each?) It sounds like a lot of money for back then, but $500 did not buy many clothes or shoes in those pre-fast fashion days. I made mine go further by buying fabric and sewing c ..read more

A Year of Zero Waste Sewing is now published, and I thought I’d show you some ways to wear one of the patterns in the book, the pleated top (which can also be made as a dress like I’ve done here). This pattern is still available on its own for the bargain price of $5AU (+tax). I do love doing these type of blog posts! 1. On its own Nothing could be simpler – just add shoes and an accessory. This is one of the joys of dress-wearing. 2. Jacket and jeans A layered look with narrow legged jeans, leather slides, and the jacket from the very popular March zine (it’s also in the Year of Zero Waste ..read more

Today is publishing day for A Year of Zero Waste Sewing, a book I started two years ago and experimentally published in instalments as zines. It’s now a proper book. It explores zero waste patterncutting concepts, making clothes for longevity, my own opinionated thoughts on various sewing topics, and stories from zero waste designers. Fashion with less waste. Liz Haywood presents an eclectic collection of zero waste patterncutting techniques, ideas for garment longevity, mythbusting and stories from zero waste designers. Discover innovative strategies for making zero waste patterns and reduc ..read more

The Craft of Clothes blog has just clicked over 8 years. 375 posts, 666,379 views, 316,690 visitors and 2300 comments. My very first blog post had 6 visitors! I knew them all. They were: my mum, brother, best friend from high school, her mother, the website man and a family friend who I mentioned it to! At the start I didn’t predict how much I’d enjoy writing a blog – I wondered if I’d run out of things to write about, but reasoned I could just take one photo and write a paragraph about it, if that ever happened (it hasn’t). I also wondered if I’d be capable of writing content each week, but k ..read more

One of the really fun parts of independent publishing is making the book’s cover. The cover for A Year of Zero Waste Sewing was finished this past week. The cover was created by Stu Nankivell, who has done the covers for my previous two books, and styled by me. Several weeks ago, Stu and his wife, who also does graphic design, came to visit. We had a look through my cover design inspo file together. This is a file I’ve been keeping over the past two years, consisting of other book covers, photos and images that “spoke to me” (not all sewing – food photography, knitting, cookbooks, posters, art ..read more

It’s not always easy to do an adjustment on a zero waste sewing pattern. This is because the whole cutting layout IS the pattern, and the shared cutting lines mean that if you change one piece, the pieces around it will be affected. There can be a hesitancy to make alterations because “it won’t be zero waste anymore”. However, I really want to squash that thought! It’s always better to make a garment that fits properly and looks good, otherwise you’re just creating a different type of waste. An alteration to the pattern might mean that it’s now low waste instead of zero, but you’ll still be st ..read more

We’ve all got them, haven’t we? UFOs or UnFinished Objects. Projects lying around the house that just need a hem or buttonholes – maybe you lost interest, or lost weight….or it didn’t turn out how you expected and you screwed it up in a ball and threw it at the wall. I regret to admit that my UFO collection has been building up (for various reasons). Here’s a catalogue of all ten, complete with excuses: 1. Pleated tops (two) These are early samples of the pleated top from the December zine. At the time, I was still working out how to construct the top and sorting out the details (eg pleating ..read more