Creating yarn and fabric from scraps. What to do with leftovers?

Creating yarn and fabric from scraps. What to do with leftovers? 

There is great satisfaction in completing a project that has been a long time in the making. After the frenetic time leading up to a completion deadline and before the start of a new project there is a period which is a thoughtful, reflective and cathartic process, the ‘big tidy up’.

 The tidying leads to a dilemma – what to do with the left-over fibres, yarn and fabrics that are too small or short to be of any real individual use?


 I’m talking here of the thrums (warp wastage after weaving) and the ort (left over short pieces of thread from sewing) and fabric scraps.

When collected they make for a substantial collection of materials. Is there some way of saving them from the bin and repurposing them for use in another project? At a recent weekend in Bradford (the home of textiles) I attended a session with tutor and textile artist Hannah Lamb and discovered a method of using thrums, orts and scraps to make exciting and intriguing yarns.


Using thin strips of yellow cotton fabric, twisting them as they are zig-zag machine stitched, yardage of textured yarn was quickly produced. 

The strips of yellow fabric stitched with purple bobbin thread and pink spool thread could be woven, knitted or coiled.


 

The ‘new’ yarn coiled and stitched into shapes. If there was a longer length of yarn the coil could be raised above the base to make pots & vessels.

 


A length of the yarn has been stitched to netting. This structure could be further embellished with additional infill stitching.

 


Fabric scraps of linen twisted and stitched as before. During the stitching process clumps of red hessian threads were added at intervals creating an interesting yarn.










Hannah Lamb: Textile Artist, Author; (2019) Poetic Cloth. London: Batsford. Programme Leader BA (Hons)Textile & Surface Design and FdA Textile Practice Bradford College. Member of 62 Group of Textile Artists. https://www.hannahlamb.co.uk/ 


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