Several Pairs of Jeans, Several Stories

There is a moment, when I take a pair of jeans apart, when I stop seeing a garment.

My imagination takes flight and begins to travel. The fabric holds all its stories, and that doesn't wash away.

When I gather several pairs of jeans to make one bag, I am not gathering fabric. I am gathering stories that have never met, and that from here on will travel together.

How it started

I will be honest, because the pretty version is no use to anyone.

I started with no job, no savings, a household sewing machine well past its prime, and piles of used clothing all around me. And an enormous urge to make something with my hands.

Sewing drew me in as a child. My mother bought pattern magazines and I would lose myself in them, imagining garments. But I was no good at it. I am left-handed, and back then left-handed scissors were a rarity. Cutting was a fight: it frustrated me, and it frustrated anyone who tried to teach me. I gave it up and went out to play instead.

Many years later I took a dressmaking course so I could sew dance costumes for my daughter. That is when I found out I could do it after all. That it had never been about talent.

The first bag

One day my daughter asked me for cushion covers for a friend on a tight budget. I suggested making them by taking apart old clothes: the kind nobody wears any more, out of fashion or stained, on their way to the bin.

By then I had been collecting things without quite knowing why. Zips from broken backpacks, studs, hardware, strap adjusters from old bags. All of it kept with the certainty that one day it would be useful.

Then she asked me for a bag made from a pair of jeans she no longer wore. I sat down at the machine.

It came out beautiful. I still remember the surprise: from so little, something like that.

Two of her university classmates saw her wearing it and each asked me for one. They brought their own jeans and their old shirts, and out of that fabric and my hoarded hardware came two bags that looked like nothing else.

That is where all of this began.

Why I keep going

At some point I came across a line that stuck to me: do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

I had no job and no money. But I had my hands, a machine, and a mountain of clothing nobody wanted. The line stopped being a line and became the method.

Then came the gut punch. I learned that there are mountains of clothing piling up in open-air dumps, much of it never worn. In the Atacama desert, thousands of kilometres from here, there are new garments lying out in the sun.

I cannot fix that. But I can choose not to add to it. So I work with as little new material as possible: the fabric has already lived, the hardware has already lived, and they get another turn.

What that means for the piece in your hands

That it is one of a kind, and not as a selling line. Literally: no two pairs of jeans wear the same way, so no two bags come out the same. The one you take home will not happen again.

That it is built to last years, not a season.

And that there are people behind it. Whoever wore those jeans before you, and me, here in Paraná, at the machine, deciding where every cut goes.

If I have learned anything, it is that you do not need much to start. Look around you: there is more material than it seems.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.