Eco-Fashion Tip of the Month: How to reuse your muslin

As I create garments I am always looking for ways I can conserve more. For me, it is a fun task to how I can innovate the clothes making process to create strategies that save fabric, thread, and other elements so as little goes to waste as possible.

This week I am excited to share one of these tips that is helping make "Triangula" and the other dresses hold their shape.

When I say "hold their shape" I am talking about the fact that the fabrics I am using for these dresses are very flowy and soft, like sheer silks and crepes and other drapy blends. They hang beautifully but if you cut and sew them into shapes, they don't hold them very well and droop.

When this happens you use interfacing, a fabric that backs the primary fabric to reinforce it and give it shape. For example, interfacing is frequently used to create stiffness in jacket collars. Since the "Varda's Women" collection is comprised of many angular shapes, we need interfacing to back the sheer fabrics to achieve the bold shapes we want.

Normally, most designers would simply buy interfacing for the garment. For me, I wanted to do better. Muslin--and inexpensive cotton that is used for draping garments--can also be used as interfacing. Since we used muslin to finalize the design of the garment as seen in previous blogs and in photo to the left, I decided we could reuse the very muslin that already was in the shapes we needed. In other words, instead of re-cutting new pieces of muslin to back the fashion fabric, we just unpicked the seams of the mock-up dress, pinned them to the green fashion fabric, and sewed them up with great results. (See photos above)

Since we made paper patters for all the pieces of "Triangula" we didn't need the muslin for anything else. If I hadn't figured out a way to use the muslin from the dress, I would probably have to throw it away, and that would be a waste.