I don’t know who needs to hear this, but going to thrift stores and buying all the usable sheets and t-shirts and jeans and then cutting them up to make rag rugs or yarn or whatever for your shabby chic/cottagecore aesthetic isn’t solar punk.
It’s gentrification.
You are taking resources away from people who need them so that you can pretend to live a less consumptive lifestyle. You are cosplaying sustainability.
The whole fucking point of rag rugs etc. was that you made use of textiles you already had that could no longer be used for their intended purpose, and you extended the lifecycle of the item by turning it into something else useful instead of throwing it in the garbage. When you buy clothing that still has use *as clothing* just to cut it into rags to make a rug, you’re *speeding up* the consumption of materials. You’re shortening the lifecycle. You are consuming MORE.
And you’re doing it by buying up resources that marginalized people need. Those thrift store sheets would look so much better on somebody’s fucking bed, but since you wanted that Little House on the Prairie vibe, someone is sleeping on a bare mattress now whilst trying to save their pennies to go to fucking Wal-Mart for bedsheets. And that denim throw pillow probably looks adorable on your sofa, but somebody needed a pair of sturdy jeans for that job they’re trying to get, and now there’s nothing available.
But sure, your house looks cute. I guess that’s important.
If you do want to work with secondhand materials- put a message round to friends. I have a cashmere jumper I got for free because a friend was going to throw it out. Just 20 minutes of knitting some custom elbow patches and sewing them on and I had a jumper for free that would have cost £150 new and was headed for the trash.
When I was a teenager my brother saved all his jeans for me and I made them into a quilt- it's got a lot of heft to it so works similarly to a weighted blanket (I didn't know what they were when I made it!).
A friend of my mum is an interior designer. She gives me offcuts.
Get the word out there among friends, in your community, even through things like Craigslist. People hate throwing away a pair of jeans over a crotch hole, or a sheet with a blood stain, or a tablecloth with a cigarette burn.
This... especially if you are thin and buying plus size clothes for this purpose or to make them into your own clothing garments. Taking in some thing that’s a size or two too big is one thing but people who are small, extra small, medium etc. purposefully buying up items that are 3X or above just to shrink them into something you want to wear? Ngl that's really fucked up given how hard access to decent clothing can be for people of size.
If there’s like 40 giant T-shirts at a thrift store, one probably won’t be that big of a deal but still, consider the pool you are drawing from and how you can do better.
