Unique Home Businesses – “Going Green” with Vintage Clothes

As I browse around the Internet and through newspapers, I enjoy leaning about small and home business ventures that feature success.  Some of these are very unique and bring great enjoyment to the owners.
 Mountain Ash Design (www.mountainashdesign.com) in Vermont (USA) features the reuse of old clothes.  (In modern verbage, we might call it “going green,” because owner Sarah O. Green …no pun intended…is redesigning and recycling old clothing and creating unique items from the fabric.)

 Using “good” old fabric again and again stems back to the pioneers who didn’t have nearby stores with new fabric.  Also, usually their budgets didn’t allow for new purchases very frequently.  So great, great, great whoever used the old fabrics for quilts and clothing.  Nothing went to waste.

 It wasn’t that long ago that I would take the skirt of one of my dresses and cut out a dress for my daughter.  I also would make doll clothes from these.  When my quiltmaking business evolved, I often used the scraps left over from my dressmaking business. 

At Mountain Ash Design, Sarah Green creates a “line of domestic items rather than apparel” for her shop.   These include pot holders (which she calls Hotholders), baby blankets, hostess aprons (yes, I made aprons from recycled fabric, too, to give as gifts to family members), tote bags and more.

Since I’m a seamstress, quiltmaker, and lover of old fabrics, I was fascinated when I read about Sarah’s enterprise.  (Incidentally, both Sarah and her husband Richard Langdell work at small businesses.  Richard operates Langdell Paper, offering a line of handmade papers.)

(Amazon image)