Rehab Your Clothes for $20 With the Sustainable Fashion Alliance
Photo: Paige Green Photography
Clothes can’t last forever, but they have more life than most of us realize. When you wear a hole in a sweater, spill wine on your jeans, or blow the seam in a jacket, do you ditch them? You’re not alone.
According to the Sustainable Fashion Alliance, people in the United States send 12.8 million tons of textile waste to landfill each year. And that rate of waste is accelerating. Today we buy four times as much clothing as we did two decades ago, yet we get 36 percent less wear out of our garments before we discard them. SFA is taking steps to solve that problem by teaching folks in the Bay Area how to fix their slightly-damaged clothes.
On Tuesday, April 23, SFA is teaming up with Fibershed for a mending bar at California College of the Arts. The event will feature four mending stations where you can learn hand mending, machine mending and altering, knit darning, and creative embroidery, plus an upcycle station, sponsored by Bella Notte Linens, where you’ll learn how to make drawstring bags from a variety of fabric scraps. There will be snacks and Revive Kombucha to fuel you through the night, and you can show off your renewed and repaired duds in a "Loved Clothes Last" photo booth by Paige Green Photography.
In addition to buying your $20 ticket (available on Eventbrite), you’ll need to bring 1-3 pieces of clothing. That can include clothing with rips, tears or split seams, clothing that you'd like to learn to alter, and clothing with stains or discoloration that you'd like to hide with embroidery. Be smart about what you pack. Bring pieces with different types of damage so you can walk away from the evening with a broader range of repair skills.
The Mending Bar will be open from 6-9pm on Tuesday, April 23 at CCA (1111 8th Street).
It’s a bummer to lose your favorite clothes to things like moth holes and mustard stains. Learn how to fix your stuff at SFA’s pop-up mending bar, and you can both divert textile from landfills and give your pieces a new lease on life.
Update: We’re giving away two free tickets for this workshop. To enter:
1. Follow @hellorockyt and @sustainablefashionalliance, and
2. Tag (at least) one friend on this Instagram post.
Deadline for entry is Saturday, April 20 at 5 pm PST. Winner will be notified by Instagram DM and via comment on this post. The Mending Bar will be Tuesday, April 23 from 6-9 pm at the California College of the Arts. Prize value is $20 per ticket. No cash equivalent for winner unable to attend, but tickets are transferable.