There’s nothing new about recycling, patchwork was invented for it. I love recycling fabrics and preserving them for posterity,and holding memories in a tangible form.
Being a child of the 60’s I have never known real hardship, though I have been so short of money I’ve had holes in my shoes, and wet feet. Nevertheless being the child of parents raised in the last war, who in turn had parents who were born in the first decade of the last century, experiencing both Wars and Depression, I have learnt economy, ingenuity and the principles of recycling from generations of Master cheese parers.
I find it hard to throw anything away if it might still serve some useful purpose. Evidence of this can be seen in the photos attached, a photograph of me, aged about 8, pudding bowl haircut and a typical 1960’s dress.
When it no longer fit me, the dress and it’s twin,( my sister had one too) went back in Mum’s fabric stash. I always loved the fabric but couldn’t find a project for it. Years later I began collecting fabrics for a scrap quilt, and there in the centre is my dress fabric, and again in several places in the quilt.
The fabric also appears in other scrap quilts of mine, in fact every last tiny piece of that fabric was recycled, and the wonderful thing for me, more than 40 years after I first wore my lovely dress it is still part of the fabric of my life.