Upcycle | Hardcover

Before buying another shirt, perhaps we should discuss the perfectly good shirt you already own.

Upcycle by designer and seamstress Annie Phillips is a practical guide to the increasingly radical idea that clothes can be fixed. Across 18 projects, Phillips teaches the fundamentals of upcycling, mending, altering, and creating, showing how a needle, some thread, and a willingness to reconsider what you already own can rescue clothes from the strange modern category of “basically fine but somehow destined for the trash.” There are techniques for repairing worn favorites, making secondhand finds actually fit, and transforming pieces you’ve stopped wearing into ones you might want again. It’s useful, colorful, approachable, and quietly makes the case that a better wardrobe might have less to do with acquiring the next thing than becoming more capable of keeping the things worth having.

The Details

• Upcycle by Annie Phillips
• Hardcover
• Sustainable fashion, sewing, mending, and clothing repair
• Covers three core approaches: Upcycling, Mending, and Creating
• Includes 18 practical sewing projects
• Techniques for repairing, altering, and repurposing clothing
• Fully illustrated
• 160 pages
• Dimensions: 10" x 8.2" x 0.8"
• Publication date: November 19, 2024

About the Author:  Annie Phillips

Annie Phillips is a designer, seamstress, and advocate for making more interesting things out of what we already have. She won BBC’s The Great British Sewing Bee in 2022 with a particularly good combination of technical skill, bold pattern and color, and the apparent refusal to accept that old fabric has finished being useful.