Make It Last

Fashion can be incredibly wasteful if you let it be. Spending $20 on a poorly made garment that you wear only a couple times before it falls apart just isn't worth the discount. A shirt in poor condition won't be sold by the charity shop after you drop it off there. It will go to a textile processing company where it will be sorted by quality. Only the best quality items will even make it to the charity shop floor and then they're only given about a month to be sold. After that, it goes back to the textile processor. 

Most of the poorly made clothes available at discount fashion stores are worn very few times and then donated, but just because an item is donated doesn't mean it ever gets put to use. A massive percentage of the millions of pounds of clothing that are donated every day just end up as waste. Seriously, we're talking millions of pounds of clothing every day across the country. The chain of textile recycling is long and spans the globe, incurring all of the corresponding environmental consequences along the way, but if you're interested in reducing your contributions to it, learn how to mend.  Whether it is clothes, shoes, books, toys, tools, etc, fixing things when their broken is becoming a lost art.  

My first mending video is up on my YouTube channel now! I own one pair of shorts (you can get away with that in Portland) and I wear them for most of the summer. And what do I do in excess in the summer? Bike. So, after several years service, these shorts have a giant hole in the leg. In the video I show you how to sew a patch and repair the hole.