Hokonui Fashion Design Awards 2019
Scrap calico from the cutting room floor
In 2019 I attended a fashion design course at Hagley College in Christchurch as I wanted to develop my pattern making and grading skills. My family had also just moved back to New Zealand from Hong Kong so it was nice to meet some people and have a routine right away too.
As part of the course, we were encouraged to enter the Hokonui Fashion Design Awards, something I would not likely have done without that push! I decided to enter the "recycled" category, for which the garments had to be made using entirely recycled or up-cycled fabrics.
I chose to make an outfit using the scrap calico that was produced by our class in the process of making toiles and pattern making exercises (which would build up alarmingly fast with a whole class). This is a plain woven, unbleached and undyed and quite structured cotton fabric, and the scraps were often quite small strips and odd shapes arising from the negative space left from cutting pattern pieces. The challenge I set myself was to make something that I would wear, aiming for a bohemian, ethereal quality, without adding any other textiles or hardware except the re-used elastic in the waistband, and using only the scraps from the cutting room floor.
Having never designed something with such limiting criteria before, I was surprised how much I enjoyed it and loved that what I came up with was something I might never have thought of were it not for the limiting criteria.
In these images, the garments are modelled by Avalon Smith, surrounded by more of the waste calico that was used to make them.
The top was designed to make the most attractive use I could come up with for the many narrow strips in the scrap pile. I washed the fabric to soften it, tore it along the grain and rubbed the edges to fray them further. These strips were then stitched up the centre onto a lace-up princess seam fitted corset-style top that I made using more pieced offcuts of calico. I love that the strips looked a little like feathers lined up closely.
Larger pieces were pieced in rectangles for the skirt tiers with seams on the outside of the garment and left raw to co-ordinate with the raw frayed texture of the top.
I wanted to make a statement via this outfit about the amount of waste fabric on the cutting room floor from making garments, and in this case, not even final, wearable garments but toiles. I was seeing first hand how much fabric waste piled up from just our class. In the industry, cutting waste is thought to average about 12-15% of total fabric used in the marker (which is the pattern cutting layout), but I've heard it can be as high as 25% and as I understand it, that is only the cutting waste and does not even account for other pre-consumer waste from toiles, samples, overproduction or defective items!
My entry didn't win its category, but I was thrilled to be awarded a special prize for "Best use of Fabric" from The Fabric Store. I was really proud of what I made, and I think Avalon looks amazing in it. She told me that my outfit and message had made an impact on her, which I am so pleased about!