a witch, a bard, a storyteller

Game Changer

“Elizabethan takedown”

Black & white digital photo

Since a few people have asked me this in a couple of places, I thought i'd answer -

It's not available as a print right now but it will be later in the year, likely October! Sorry for the wait but due to the contract of the art book this is for, I'm not allowed to sell prints/merch etc of the piece until 6 months after the Kickstarter campaign.

Medieval maidens and their pointy shoes

Inhale. Alright, bear with me.

I can make a pirate shirt out of rectangles and use up every inch of a piece of fabric if i lay the pieces out correctly. Is this actually less wasteful than if the shirt has a shaped armscye and neckline? So long as the pieces still fit onto the same original cut of fabric?

Or more relevantly, I recently saw someone brand their skirts as an adjustable, historically inspired, zero-waste design. It was literally an 18th century petticoat. Two rectangles of pleated fabric with waist ties for the front and back panels. Aside from the questionable ethics of claiming they designed this skirt, is it actually less wasteful?

People who sew know that generally speaking, a circle skirt is considered very “wasteful,” because cutting it in just one or two pieces requires an awkward amount of fabric, and the inner circle of the waistline is generally too small to use for anything (but it’s big enough for part of a pocket!). But if you divide the circle into pie slices, you can rotate each slice so that you can “top and tail” them across your fabric. And in doing so you can potentially achieve a wider skirt hem, even if you have to trim the hem into a curve. But according to “zero waste” methods of patterning, the gored skirt is wasteful while the pleated rectangle skirt isn’t. That makes no sense to me.

The point is that this definition doesn’t actually fulfill the goal of being less wasteful, IMO. If a rectangle petticoat uses 3 yards of fabric and a gored circle skirt of the same circumferences uses the same but I can also fit my bodice pieces into the off-cuts but I have some bits of oddly shaped cabbage left over, can that truly be considered more wasteful than the rectangle skirt? The same total yardage has been used for both projects, but I got more pieces out of the second method even if there’s also more scrap.

If we only consider “waste” to be the literal trash from a project, then sure “zero-waste” cutting is less wasteful, but that isn’t a functional definition to me, especially when working exclusively in natural fiber materials that will naturally decompose. The goal is to minimize impact on the environment. For materials like cotton or linen or silk, the impact has already occurred in the manufacture of the fabric itself (growing, dyeing, weaving, finishing etc). The scraps from my sewing could be thrown in a compost heap and not have any additional impact. So for natural fiber materials, the only thing I consider true waste is using more fabric than is necessary for any given project. Laying pieces hapharzadly in a way that renders more of the yardage unusable is wasteful. Having a few off-cuts that would have been taken up into a comparable rectangle-cut garment is not.

For polyester and other synthetics that would damage the environment as it degrades, I have different standards, because in that case minimizing scrap is more vital. But if we’re already talking about zero-waste then I feel it’s a given that we understand poly and other synthetics should be avoided where possible.

Also, on an individual scale versus an industrial one, trying to reduce waste means different things to me. Individually as hobbyists, I feel that the amount of trash we generate is less relevant to the goal of reducing environmental impact than the amount of yardage we consume and the longevity of the pieces we make. Using a hundred yards of fabric in a garment I will wear once and only once is wasteful to me, even if I don’t generate a single scrap of cabbage.