What I have learnt in my childhood and what I keep trying to adopt in my everyday life, are my mum’s lesson on recycling, especially of clothes, fabrics and sewing equipment. 

That is why I would like to say something about it. 

When I was a child there were times where people used to buy fabrics at the weekly open air market or else in the only two haberdasheries of the local area that sold fabrics and finishing named “Cubo magico” and “Merceria Raffa”. Thirty years ago it was not custom to purchase all one’s clothes from shops. Much rather there was at least a tailor in the family or in the neighbourhood.

I can still remember when the kitchen table was full of tailor’s paper pinned on cloth strips of different sizes. Women of our village came to sew together almost every day with my mother or just to ask her advice. I liked listening to their conversations about new issues of those fashion magazines with included all model patterns that they usually swapped. 

During the last Christmas holidays, some family friends came for dinner. The topic of  conversation was firstly on Christmas presents. We overall receive clothes or accessories, so the talk moved around fashion and trends. What all of us agreed was that nowadays people buy “fast fashion” because there is not time to sew anymore. Apart from that, it may be a paradox but in our area it is now difficult to find fabric sellers.

It was there that my mum’s friend remembered a stored beautiful woolen offcut gifted a long time before. She said that it had a floral pattern with dark red tones, soft to the touch and lightweight. She partially used it years before to make a shirt, but she did not know what to do with what was left. As soon as she asked if it could be useful to me, I looked at my mother who nodded and enthusiastically replied: <<Of course! I love vintage fabrics, they make you think and travel within your mind >>.

A few weeks later me and my mum put our ideas into practice. 

She started with measurements and claimed that the length was not enough for a long stole, as I had thought at the beginning. Instead she suggested sewing two loop scarves and immediately we both  agreed to adorn them with some vintage buttons. I went straight to find two good ones in an old biscuit tin where she keeps them.

I suppose it took her only an hour to sew them. Even though if they were been two simple things, the satisfaction you feel by creating something with your hands it is so much that makes time pass by quickly.