For anyone who has been reading for a while, it will be no surprise that I am in love with the concept of Zero Waste fashion design.

Someone who is big in this space is Zero Waste Daniel This little clip gives you a bit f a run down on what Zero Waste Daniel is about.

I think his techniques can absolutely be applied to home sewing, where, like I mentioned in my first Zero Waste post, it is reported that fabric waste can be as high as 30%.

I have had a go at something similar before, where I dug into my scrap bin and put together this cute tank for one of my daughters, and I loved how it turned out, she wore it for the rest of the season. Click through and have a read if you want to have a go.

But I just love how ZWD goes one step further and puts together the coolest portrait mosaics so I just had to have a go myself.

It was pretty time-consuming, but I worked from a photo and did up a design in much the same way as you would if you were designing a foundation paper pieced quilt block. Outlining the pieces and the order you would put them together in.

Then I dug through my scrap bin, which is extensive because I just can’t seem to get rid of anything, and got the colours I needed, cut the pieces and serged them together.

This is what I came up with:

…and a stop motion for good measure (did I mention that this took me ages!)

You can see with the knit fabrics (and the skill of the operator 🙂 ) that it didn’t turn out perfectly the same as the plan, but I still love it. It is the size of my chest, so I am planning to make it into a muscle tank when I get around to it, which I think is going to be awesome. Really a statement piece, all made from scraps.

Like the other zero waste techniques I have tried, this takes longer than just throwing a muscle tank together would, another way of embracing slow fashion??

If you have a go at something like this, I would love to see, so be sure to grab some pics and hashtag them #SEW4BUB

As always, thanks for reading.

Liz xx