What am I making: Fashion Revolution Week (belated)

 Fashion Revolution Week was April 24-30, and I made this project during that week, but I just had not photographed it or blogged about it until now.  Only a month late!

Fashion Revolution is a movement  to raise awareness about the human and ecological impact of the clothing industry. http://fashionrevolution.org/


 Fashion Revolution Week happens on the anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory collapse, where 1,138 garment workers  in Bangladesh were killed and many more injured on 24th April 2013. more than half the victims were women.  The day before the collapse, large cracks were showing, but the next day,  garment workers were ordered to return to work or else they'd be docked a month's pay. The clothing sweatshops in the building made clothes for many  brands, including  cheap fast-fashion  brands Primark, Walmart,  and  more expensive brands like  Benetton. People often think that    more expensive brands of clothing will have better worker pay and working conditions, but it's not always true.
The hashtag #whomademyclothes  is used on twitter for consumers to ask various brands for transparency about their production.

 In addition to the poor working conditions of many garment workers around the world,  there are large ecological issues with the entire fashion industry. Even if the workers are well paid and have safe conditions,  the clothing and textile industry  produces very much chemical waste and pollution.  The entire life cycle of a garment (from  growing the cotton, milling the fabric, dyeing, cutting and sewing) consumes so much water. It takes around 1,800 gallons of water to grow enough cotton to produce just one pair of  jeans.
With the current sped-up fashion cycle where trends only last a few months and clothing is so cheap,  clothing is purchased  and quickly thrown away in huge quantities.  Americans alone throw away approximately 14 million tons of garments each year, and most of this does not decompose in landfills because  even if it's biodegradable (like cotton),  it is usually inside plastic bags or does not receive enough  oxygen to break down.  Clothing is not frequently recycled, and it's a difficult process when a single garment may be a blend of  different fibers. It's not like aluminum cans where you can just melt it all down.
I also  recommend the movie called "The True Cost"  , about the  fast fashion/disposable fashion problem.It's on Netflix and Youtube.

 I've  drastically cut back the amount of clothing I buy, but I do still like to make clothes,  it's a creative outlet even if I don't always need more clothes. Even though homemade clothes are not exploiting workers, there is still the issue of the fabric, where was it made, etc.  Fabric production has the same ecological issues as clothing production. So my project for  Fashion Revolution week used my own labor and used scrap fabric that I had left over from older projects.  The scraps weren't big enough to make a whole garment from, but I  combined a solid knit with a floral knit to make this top. It's a simple  cap sleeved top but the fabric splicing gives it more visual interest than a T-shirt.

What am I making

I made these tiles a couple of years ago in a ceramics class,  but I just glued them to a board and grouted them this past weekend. I'm trying to  finish incomplete projects and use up   materials from my craft hoard.

When I made the tiles,  I just glazed them random colors instead of having a set picture in mind of how they would fit together. So it is a somewhat random layout, I just tried to make a couple of sort-of continuous diagonal stripes. I don't know if I will use this for a table or just an outdoor decorative thing. It's about 18" square so it could be a small table but  I might hang it on the wall of the back patio.

I do  wish I had glazed the colors more in a planned way to make a more cohesive design.

This is so weird, in the edit screen this is all normal lowercase but in the published post, it shows all caps. I swear I did not type this whole post in capslock and I don't know why it's showing that way!

I tried depotting eyeshadows

 The last year or two, there has been a trend of people depotting their  makeup from the palettes or packaging it  came in, and putting  them into Z palettes. 
These are empty magnetic palettes that you can customize  them, so for example if you love some colors in a large palette and hate others, you can  get rid of the ones you never use and  make your own palette with just your favorites. It's also a good way to save storage space. I decided to give it a try, but the 20$ Z-pallette  is a big Nope for me! That is just for the EMPTY  box with no  makeup in it! I figured I could DIY something for free.

 I used an old metal tin from an AOL cd. Remember those?  AOL used to send out their stupid installation Cds all the time in the early 2000's, , sometimes just in a cardboard sleeve, but sometimes they came in a metal tin.
It must be around 15 years old, but that is how I am, I  kind of hoard random things for craft supplies  thinking I will eventually use it for something. And I did use it! I spray painted it to  cover up the AOL logo. And it is nice and thin, just perfect for a makeup palette. The metal is steel, so  magnets stick to it.
So far  my cost is 0$.

Next I had to depot the eyeshadows from their original packaging. I watched some youtube videos that involved using heat to soften the glue, but I skipped that and just  pried them out with brute force and a ceramics tool that is similar to a dental tool.

Now there are two ways to make the eyeshadows stick in the palette. You can either have a magnetic layer in the  bottom of the palette, and the  eyeshadow pans will stick IF they are a ferrous metal. Some of mine were not ferrous. The other  option is    to glue little magnets to the bottom of the shadow pans, and they will all stick to the steel tin.  I decided to use this method since some of my pans were non-ferrous metal.
You can buy the magnets to stick to the back, but you know I wanted to do this for free, so I just  found some old magnetic business cards  that were stuck to the side of my fridge, and I cut them up into little squares and glued them on the back of the eyeshadow pans.  One of the magnets  was for Webvan, which was an old online grocery deliver company that went out of business in 2001. LOL Did I mention that I save craft supplies FOREVER? But I do eventually find a use for them so don't tell me to purge my treasure trove. I just saved $20!

My end result is here:

In this one tin, I  have 6 Colour Pop singles,  a Physicians Formula Quad (the rectangles), 2 L'oreal   duos (the  half circles), and a Stila "Dare to Bare" palette which contained 6 eyeshadows  plus a highlight and bronzer.. (I don't use bronzer so I just use it as eyeshadow).  I was able to condense  5 separate packages into this one tin.

I  can also take out just a few of the colors at a time and put them in an empty Altoids tin if I want to take them in my purse or for travel.