At the end of last summer I sewed a button back on a pair of shorts before folding them ready for the next season. This summer I wore them for one evening and by the end of it the button had fallen off. This is the third summer it has happened with the same pair of shorts. So if I’m so useless at sewing, why did I decide to create a whole bag by myself?
Sewing is an undeniably useful skill to have. But somehow the last generations have lost this manual skill. In fact, while my grandmother is an amazing seamstress my mum and I have very little to no idea about how to properly sew. When I saw @glowingrosy’s Tweet of two bags she made herself from fabric she already owned I thought to myself that maybe I would be able to make a bag too, after all I already had some velvet leftover.
An energetic Dutch girl
Before starting my bag, I had to speak to the person that inspired me, @glowingrosy. Her real name is Margot de Jong and she’s 18 years old and lives in a small city in The Netherlands. Margot has been passionate about fashion since she was about 16 and that passion has led her to study fashion in The Netherlands. Ever since she joined hf Twitter (high fashion Twitter), fashion plays a big role Margot’s everyday life. “I opened a private account on Twitter to follow fashion and art accounts to find inspiration for my high school art classes. At first I was just observing and re-twitting but then I decided to get more involved in the community and began twitting my own things. Hf Twitter is where I learned most things I know about fashion and where my love for it began,” she said. Margot admits that while her college gave her the opportunity to learn how to sew with a sewing machine she didn’t really excel at it, but she kept pushing herself to get better.
When Covid-19 began spreading Margot couldn’t go to college anymore but she decided not to give up sewing. She asked her grandfather, who’s a pro at it, to give her sewing lessons and a sewing machine which he procured her by borrowing one from a friend. Before making bags Margot sewed facemasks from second-hand fabric to help her community, friends and family deal with the pandemic as they were going through a nation-wide shortage. “I posted the facemasks on my personal Instagram and my hf Twitter account and it blew up. In a month and a half I think I’ve sold 130 facemasks and made 200 for the community,” said Margot. “I used to spend my nights sewing and the days studying to finish my first year of college,” she continued, “but it didn’t really matter because it was very important to me to help people stay safe, help the medical sector and the BLM movement to which I donated part of the profit.”
While helping her community Margot also decided to make bags. She posted the results on her hf Twitter gaining more than 600 likes and lots of “lovely comments,” as she defined them. Margot then began uploading her creations on her other socials and started selling them which then led to the creation of her website, glowingrosy.com.
I asked Margot why re-using old and pre-owned fabrics was so important to her. “We live in such a crucial time right now where change just needs to happen,” she said, “even if it’s from a super small business owner. We can’t keep the fashion industry going the way it is right now.
“I mean of course small efforts have been made by a lot of brands but there’s still a super long road ahead,” she continued, “I think consumers should also inform themselves because many don’t realise how polluting the fashion industry truly is.
“Of course many don’t have the opportunity to buy sustainably or go thrifting but if the people who can do it would confront brands about sustainability and shop ethically the industry might really start to change,” she concluded.
The Friends of Embroidery
Inspired by the words of Margot I went to look for my own leftover fabric. When I found it I realised I had no knowledge of how to sew so I had to go speak to some professionals. Le Amiche del Ricamo (The Friends of Embroidery) is a group of women who meet up to embroider, knit and do some basic sewing in my hometown of Pesaro, Italy. Denise Betti, 66, is the owner of the embroidery school. She opened it 25 years ago to show a friend who complained about the price for an embroidery job how much time and effort actually goes into it. Denise got into her craft through family tradition as her mother was an embroiderer herself and helped Denise work on her dowry. “Back then I used to scream that I would never get married and I used to cry when I had to work on the dowry but by the time I was 14 I already had a boyfriend,” said Denise.
To Denise sewing is something that comes from within as well as a practical skill. “Making things yourself is undoubtedly more satisfying than buying them,” she said. However, she’s seen a decrease in numbers of people being able to make things by hand. At her school Denise teaches embroidering to around 100 people along with her other three co-workers Laura, Cinzia and Paola. Together they create a community whose members help one another. “Here I have everything I need,” said Denise, “if I need a certain doctor or have to buy something and don’t know where to find it, all I have to do is ask the people at the school. They always know someone who knows somebody else who can help.”
Le Amiche del Ricamo do not only focus on keeping alive a practical skill and chatting, they also focus on recycling and never wasting anything. “I always push my students to use fabric they already own. We have the best of the best here in terms of quality of fabric, threads and wool but I don’t like throwing away things away, especially because I am aware of the work that goes into weaving fabric.”
Velvet in Summer
The best advice Denise gave me to embark on my journey was not to be afraid to make mistakes so I called my grandmother, who’s been sewing for her whole life, and asked her to help me create the bag. When I arrived at her house wearing my facemask on a hot Italian summer afternoon, we inspected the yellow velvet I had brought. We decided to make a small, rectangular handbag with plissés to attach the straps. We began the process by measuring how big the fabric rectangle had to be and we settled for 30cm in height and 27cm in length. Once we cut the fabric and basted it, we sewed the two rectangles together with the sewing machine. “We’re only going to sew three sides of the fabric,” my grandma told me sitting in front of the sewing machine. After two perfectly well-done sides she handed the work over to me. Within the first 30 seconds I created a small droop. But my grandma told me not to worry, she had done that for around 80 years while I hadn’t which sounded a lot like what Denise had told me a few days earlier.
We then moved onto the lining for which we chose a light, white cotton and cut a rectangle 1cm bigger than the velvet and sewed it on three sides with the machine. Once we had both pieces of fabric we had to insert the lining inside of the velvet and make them line up perfectly, which was quite hard. After a few minutes of shaking and cursing we managed to do it and quickly pinned it to get it ready for another round under the sewing machine.
We finally had the main body of the bag and had to make the straps. We attached them by making plissés on both sides of the bag. As the bag was already small in dimensions the straps had to be no more than 2cm wide. We cut a long piece of fabric for both straps and sewed them on the reverse side, like we did for everything else, so I asked my grandma, “How are we going to turn them over?” and, with smirk on her face, she said, “It’s a trick!” She put a small amount of thread through a needle and made a chunky knot with both ends of the thread, sewed it a couple of times on one end of the strap and inserted it through the gap of the noodle-like piece of fabric. With much patience she then began sliding the needle from one side to the other, a whole meter away.
“You know,” she began narrating, “when I was little we didn’t throw away anything. We used to recycle every fabric and button. We used to make one coat, use it for a few years and then we unstitched it, turned it on the other side and sewed it again creating a whole new coat.
“We didn’t have money because of the war, only very few did. Some people used to pay for my work as a seamstress with beans or bread, which I accepted. But I was lucky because both my grandparents had fully functioning farms so we never starved. But there were people…” and she paused for a second to summon all her courage and push the tears back. “There was a woman in Rieti [Italy] who had six or seven children and she didn’t know how to feed them. One day she ended up at our house and saw my mum with a basket of beans with the peel still on and asked if she could have them for her kids. My mum told her no because, although they looked good on the outside, they had been eaten by insects. The woman asked once more to have them to feed her children. My mum finally gave in and the woman took them.
“I began crying seeing that scene and, really it makes me cry even now. I thought to myself ‘To save her children she gave them rotten food’. Now I feel like some children don’t appreciate the efforts their parents make anymore. Everyone wants everything now. Everybody simply wants. ‘To want’ didn’t even exist back then.”
“Look!” she told me pointing at the straps. And then, like in a magic trick, she pulled the inside out and exposed the soft yellow velvet. We looked at each other smiling. In a matter of seconds she made two plissés and sewed one strap on one side of the bag then she passed it to me and I tried to replicate it on the other side. “If you were to come here once or twice a week you’d really learn how to sew,” said my grandmother. Yeah, I really would, I thought. After the last stich I showed the final product to her and, while you could definitely tell which side my grandmother sewed and which one I sewed, the final result was incredible. “I was actually really anxious about making this bag,” she confessed. Why, I asked her. “Because I never made a bag and I didn’t want to disappoint you.
“You used to make shirts and trousers from scratch, grandma, I never even thought you could disappoint me.”
Showing off my bag
The days after making the bag I wore it any chance I had and I realised that making things yourself instead of buying them truly is a different type of satisfaction which is why I felt proud of wearing it. It wasn’t as easy as buying something from a shop as it took us a whole morning to make the bag, but it was worth it for many reasons. I spent a whole morning with my grandmother to make something together that I know I will cherish forever like the most precious diamond ring. I used fabric that was essentially rotting in my garage and, by using it, I also made the fashion industry a tiny, tiny bit more sustainable. In fact only less than 1% of the material used to make clothing is recycled making fashion a linear system.
Will I make another bag from scratch? Probably, and perhaps something else too. I still have so much fabric leftover and I like listening to my grandmother’s advice and anecdotes. Not bad for someone who couldn’t even sew a button back on, right?
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