March has been a hectic month. I was approached by In Good Company Events to run a sewing workshop for Zero Waste Scotland’s Pass It On Week. The idea was to encourage people to reuse and recycle household things and pieces from their wardrobe so we ran a workshop making little lunch totes out of old curtains.

John Amabile was there on both days doing a showcase of all the cool things ZWS had put on for the event, on a wee stage in the middle of the St Enoch Centre. I taught him how to make himself a little lunch tote. What a character he is! He;s also excellent at sewing which came as no surprise!

My Mum and Dad just happened to be passing as I went on stage. My Mum leaned against the backdrop and half of it fell off. Haha! Cue event organisers frantically trying to put it all back up again. I will be keeping all events top secret from her from now on don’t worry! Ha!

We were also asked if we could run a Teddy Bear Hospital where people could bring their teddies that were in need a little TLC, drop them off and the Sew Confident ‘Doctors’ would sort them out. This is probably the cutest thing I have ever been asked to organise. It was a massive hit, and Gayle, Eliza and Ellie were inundated with bears, pigs, snakes, elephants, mice, you name it, they fixed them!

I was on tote bag duties but prior to the event I did do a little bit of ‘surgery’ myself on this sorry looking Hippo. He needed an entire new body because his has completely disintegrated. There was no pattern to follow so I had such a giggle decided how fat I was going to make him. Wee pot belly out of a furry fabric and he was on his way home!

We were joined by Lynne from Squinty Stuff(who is also a fellow Hidden Lane Studio occupant) who was making upcycled jewellery, the boys from Maklab were using a 3d printer to create things from recycled plastic and Sugru were there too. If you haven’t heard of Sugru it’s this mad plastercine type stuff that sets and basically fixes ANYTHING. 

It was a great weekend, that ran seamlessly thanks to In Good Company Events! I was totally done in after it!

At the same time Glasgow School of Art got in touch with me about running some upcycling classes with their students for  ZWS Pass It On Week. I was starting to feel like I should be on the Zero Waste Scotland payroll by this point! These were held in the GSA student halls which is a brilliant building with bright spaces on each floor for different activities. The students were all fab and really got right into it. On the last class one student, Daniela brought in some digitally printed fabric she had bought to make a swimsuit for a design brief she had. It was really cool. She also had some digitally printed towelling which, I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know you could get! Instantly I’m thinking CUSTOM BEACH TOWELS because I have holidays on the brain just now. She sent me the website and it’s actually quite reasonable(If you are a student I believe you get a discount – email them) . You can check it out here https://www.bagsoflove.co.uk/print-on-fabrics.aspx

THEN I was asked to go and film something upcycling related in Edinburgh at extremely short notice. I was genuinely starting to feel like the Scottish Upcycling Ambassador. Every phonecall was something to do with Pass It On week! In a week I had gone from rarely thinking about it to looking at everything with thrifty imaginative eyes(That leather jacket could be a handbag, that table cloth could be a raincoat etc haha!). You can read all about that in the next post!

Jenny x