Local nonprofit finds new homes for old fabrics

STORY BY EMILY WILLEMAN | PHOTOS BY BAILEY BARNARD

A large, warehouse-like building with concrete floors and bare white walls has its garage doors open on a mild spring afternoon. A musty smell leaks out, indicating the age of its contents. Piles of fabric sit in neat stacks on wooden tables and in boxes on ceiling-high bookshelves. The piles are divided into fabric types, labeled “knits” or “t-shirt material.”

Immediately to the left of the building’s entrance are nearly 45 kimonos dangling from hangers on a metal clothing rack. All the fabric in the building used to be something else before it was cut and stacked, but these kimonos are some of the only pieces left in their original form.

Ragfinery is a downtown Bellingham nonprofit founded in April 2014 that specializes in upcycling fabrics — or remaking them into something new and usable — while providing job training for the clients of its parent company, ReUse Works. ReUse Works is a nonprofit in Whatcom County that focuses on waste recycling and job creation for low-income individuals.

RE-PURPOSED, RE-IMAGINED

Of the 25 billion pounds of textiles generated each year in the United States, 15 percent are donated or recycled, according to a 2009 report by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Providing a new use for fabrics that otherwise would have been thrown away is one of Ragfinery’s main focuses.

Ragfinery also offers sewing, weaving and quilt-making classes and a consignment area for local garment-makers and artists to sell their wares. Most of the consignment items sold are upcycled, but rarely, vintage items such as the currently displayed kimonos sneak in, says Shan Sparling, Ragfinery’s business manager.

“I had to basically talk the director into it,” Sparling says. “It was a one-time situation for us. We’re actually hoping people take some of these kimonos and upcycle them.”

The kimonos have recently found a new home at Ragfinery after belonging to local artist Phyllis C. Evans since the early 1990s. A whip-smart woman with a tell-it-as-it-is attitude, “frail” is the last word to use to describe Evans.

“The thing with Phyllis is that she’s pretty special,” Sparling says. “She has that little twinkle in her eye.

KIMONOS ACROSS OCEANS

Evans originally purchased three or four bales of kimonos and ended up collecting close to 800.

The kimonos on display in Ragfinery are the last of her collection. She bought each bale for about $800 from a showroom in California selling thousands of kimonos brought back from Japan.

“Nobody in Japan wanted them,” Evans says.

In the 90s, Japan was going through a period of westernization and discarding their kimonos in favor of Americanized clothing, selling their used kimonos to companies such as the one Evans and other artists bought them from.

Evans was particularly interested in the faded quality of the kimonos that reminded her of the places she visited in her travels through Europe.

After her husband died while she was in her sixties, Evans visited her paternal family in northern Italy for about a month. She traveled through the Alps and visited villages along the way. She took photos of her trips and had them printed in larger sizes when she returned home to Aberdeen, Washington.

“I’ve always worked with textiles and I’ve always liked sewing and that kind of thing,” Evans says. “Forty years ago, I made a wall hanging that depicted a scene that I had in my mind from camping.”

SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW

She used the enlarged photos to develop tapestry patterns, and then recreated those images using pieces of fabric she took from the kimonos. Over a period of three to four years, Evans used the kimonos to find the exact shades of fabric she needed for each photograph. Out of all the kimonos she bought, she says no two were alike.

Now living in the Leopold Retirement Residence in downtown Bellingham, Evans simply does not have the space in her apartment or a use for the 45 kimonos, so she turned to Ragfinery’s consignment area to help her find them new homes.

While the majority of the kimonos Evans bought were turned into large pieces of art, the few remaining at Ragfinery await a new artist or wearer.

Instead of relying on grants or donations as many nonprofits do, ReUse Works, Ragfinery and its sister company, Appliance Depot — which repairs and sells appliances that otherwise would have wound up in the dump — are entirely self-sufficient, says ReUse Work’s media specialist, Dallas Betz.

“What we hope to be is a creative hub for ideas. We want to inspire people to figure out how to make new things out of something old,” Sparling says.

In the meantime, Evan’s kimonos will sit untouched, along with the donated pieces of linens, children’s old ballerina costumes and huge rolls of sheepskin lying amid the hum of the fabric-cutting machine.