A few years ago, I decided to save all of the fabric scraps left on the cutting room floor from our clothing making. There wasn't a perfect plan in place on how to make use of them or even how to manage sorting or storing them, but I couldn't accept that each round of editions resulted in a significant amount of unusable off-cuts. These high quality remnants deserve more than to become landfill - but it can be quite the uphill battle to make use of them.

Traditional western clothing shapes are generally tailored to the body, which means there are many opposing curves that leave negative spaces in the fabric that don't make up a part of the finished garment. Sometimes these leftover pieces are big enough to cut smaller items like hat panels, but they all have to be cut by hand due to the great variation in shape, size and orientation. This poses the first of many hurdles that keeps people from using them.

The first idea was to select the largest pieces and ship them to my friend, Tokyo-based hat maker Ouji Yamada. He was willing to take on the time consuming challenge of hand cutting that this project required. Next, with the help of our studio mate and weaver Marina Contro, we began making small handwoven rugs which make use of the narrower and odd shaped pieces. Slowly we're establishing a promising system - separating fabric scraps by size, fiber type and potential end use.

Last year we stumbled on the Shotwell Paper Mill. Just down the street from our studio, hiding in plain sight, was someone specializing in turning fabric waste into high quality paper. It seemed highly improbable. My first visit to Pam's studio sparked the conversation and we gradually navigated how to work together. The biggest challenge was finding the increasingly rare mould maker who could create the wood and metal mesh mould based on the size of our hangtags. Almost a year later, we finally received the mould and Pam went to work on the first large batch of hangtags - beginning this fall, all of our hangtags will be made from cotton, linen & hemp fabrics recycled from our own garment production.