Evie standing outdoors and smiling at the camera, wearing a chunky handmade grey scarf. She has short hair which is dyed pink at the top. She also wears a pink denim jacket and leopard print top

I am Evie, the creator behind Holdcroft Handmades.

For as long as I can remember I have been obsessed with fibre arts in all its glorious forms. However, it has always sat uneasily with me how the progression of the art form seems increasingly wasteful, particularly in the fashion industry.

Fast fashion is responsible for 10% of annual global carbon emissions (more than all annual international flights and maritime shipping!). And if you then consider the fact that the time and money that it costs businesses to recycle clothing and fabric, the picture begins to come clearer as to why less than 1% of clothes are recycled with the process of “material to material” recycling into new fashion pieces!

Now, I am aware that as long as I am making clothes and accessories I am contributing to this problem to some extent. This is why I am committed to only creating items in small batches, using my stock of materials before purchasing any more and being an advocate for slow fashion.

My mission does not end here. I also carry this ethos through to my art pieces. All of the beautiful (at least to me!) artworks you see on my Fibre Arts page are made purely from offcuts, scraps, and materials I have collected that would otherwise be heading for landfill.

All pieces in my Reclaimed Materials series are made entirely from single use plastic packaging and other unnecessary plastics that I find along my way. I hope that I can transform these items into well loved pieces of art to sit in someone’s home, rather than finding their way into the ocean and being a plastic wrapper in some poor turtle’s home instead!

You may think that this is over the top, but to me this is what it means to be a sustainable artist. This is not the end of the story - I am continuing to look for more ways to be sustainable in my practice - there is no such thing as perfection in our strides towards a more sustainable future, but every effort we make is a step in the right direction. I hope that you join me in my mission to reduce the impact that we humans have on our planet.

BBC - Why Are Clothes So Hard To Recycle? | The World Bank | Ribble | National Geographic - Fast Facts About Plastic Pollution