Building upon our tradition of creating community artworks from recycled materials, York Learning’s 2024 Community Art Project focussed on denim, one of the least sustainable materials in the fashion industry.

Learners from York Learning’s dressmaking classes collected denim scraps from previous projects, which were sewn together to eventually become the base of the piece you see here: ‘The Meadow’.

Alongside the dressmaking students, Debs New, Creative Textiles Tutor, collected ideas for flowers, motifs and additional recycled materials that could be used to inspire the work. Debs worked with a group from Kyra Women’s
Project to embroider a huge variety of flowers, by hand, throughout the autumn term. A small band of volunteers then helped to attach each individual piece of the meadow to the denim base, and Routes2Success learners researched facts and figures about the fashion industry.

Barely anything used in this project was bought new.  Alongside donations of scraps of denim from dressmaking projects, embroidery threads were purchased from the Cone Exchange (a textiles scrap store in Harrogate), and the labels are made from plastic bags.

The result of all of this hard work is the artwork you see here: a stunning meadow with a fantastic range and variety of hand sewn textile flowers.