Garments to bags…

The time has come for some of my clothes to find new uses.  These worn out jeans have had years of use as jeans…

I made these shorts from a length of linen I found on a pile of hard rubbish on a Brisbane kerb when I was there one summer.  They have had years of hard wear and been re-dyed once or twice.  Surprisingly enough the screen printed design on the pocket details didn’t take dye!

They are now completely threadbare in places that would create embarrassment if they were to fail, further evidence of the hard wearing qualities of linen.

I paired the jeans up with some leftovers from past sewing adventures, which finished out the lining.

The jeans pockets went on the inside, retained for future use.  The outside features the pockets of a pair of hemp shorts that hit the dye pot some time ago.

I teamed the linen shorts up with the remainders of a pair of men’s twill cotton pants bought for a dollar from the Red Cross.

I love a beautifully executed pocket, and there are two of them featured on the outside of this bag, while the back pockets of the shorts are still on the inside of the bag.

In between the sewing, I spent the weekend mordanting fibre and continuing to try to exhaust dye baths from the workshop a fortnight ago!  By the end of the weekend I was down to pastels… And there was the odd Stuff, Steep and Store jar to be going on with.  Using the microwave has lowered the barriers to taking an opportunistic dye find or something that seems promising but whose dye properties are unknown to me and putting it up for future reference.  Here, rat-nibbled pomegranate remains collected off the ground… as no edible pomegranate would be turned to dye at our house!