Handsewing

Finally, all the parts are joined together by sewing — either by hand or with a foot pedal sewing machine. To wear a hand-sewn garment is a privilege I never experienced until I was introduced to it in Guizhou. The  imperfect hand-stitching gives the fabric a subtle volume that allows the seams to conform to your body. Wearing it gives one a comforting cozy feeling that machine-sewn clothing simply does not have. Sewing machines seem to flatten the hand-woven fabric, while hand-stitching makes the fabric come alive.  

Once all sewing is done by hand, choosing the stitching becomes an exciting way to customize the design and give it a finishing touch. There are several stitches that are unique to their traditional costumes and not used in Western clothing. We had to create a library of their stitches in different colors and thread widths, so I could design using the techniques they already knew. By using cotton thread, it can be dyed in any color or left in its natural white. 

Hand-sewing a garment certainly takes longer and is the reason why most of us have never experienced it in person. Whereas machine-sewing a pair of jeans in a factory takes 18 minutes (Source: To Die For), sewing it entirely by hand will takes 2.5 days. 

All the slight imperfections inherent in handiwork balance each other out gives the garment charm. The stitching looks imperfectly perfect. A machine-made stitch, on the other hand, is straight and always look perfect. The down side is that any mistake, like an uneven stitch or change in tension, is obvious and must be corrected or risk looking like a factory defect. 

Hand-sewing can also accomplish what sewing machines cannot — like threading through hundreds of hand-pleats or make frog button closures. Plastic button do not exist in nature, obviously, nor do metal hook-and-eyes, snaps, or zippers. Instead, the villagers carry on the ancient Chinese art of use of fabric to make hand-made buttons. They showed me how we could make them in different sizes, cut them shorter or longer, and dye them in different colors. It could all be customized, and we did not worry about buying them in bulk quantities and the minimum quantity constraints of the global trims market. 

Rather than be dependent on the supplier or trims store, we were self-sufficient craftsman free to create whatever we wanted. 

This did not feel like freedom in the beginning, however. I had to fly all of my trims with me in my suitcase. Trims are what hold a garment together and give it that finished look. However, there was no Garment District or craft stores to supply them for my clothing. Slowly, I had to learn how to design without conventional buttons and button-holes, without zippers, without ribbon, and without elastic. Designing without them explain why “ethnic” artisan clothing oftentimes consists of draw-string pants, wrap-tie belts, and loose silhouettes. On top of the time-consuming fabric-making and zero-waste construction, learning how to design without these industrialized trims was incredibly challenging for me.

No waste, use less

Ten percent of industrially-produced clothing is thrown away as waste in clothing factories (fact-check with To Die For stat). This is because the design of the garment is not created with the entire width of the fabric in mind. A pattern is created after a designer sketches out their vision, and so cutting fabric is the job of the pattern-maker — not the designer who may not even see this stage. There is a lot of talk about zero-waste design in the design schools now, but it always felt more like a theoretical rather than a real concept.

In Guizhou, this was of course different. Limited production means that every inch of fabric is used. The villager that has spent the entire year growing the cotton, weaving the fabric, dyeing and finishing it, is the same one that cuts it into the final garment.  It was this garment that she had in mind when she calculated how many cotton seedlings would first need to being planted. She knows exactly how much of her time was been spent creating the fabric, and makes sure none of it goes to waste.

Handwoven fabric is 38-40 cm wide, so all the garments are designed according to this restriction. Jackets, their sleeves, and pleated skirts are all cut using the entire width of the fabric, all the way to the selvedge. The remaining fabric scraps are used for making buttons, binding, or mending holes later on. It’s zero-waste pattern-cutting born out of real limitations. When so much time and effort is placed into making the fabric, you do not want to throw any of it away. 

For me, designing in this way using modern silhouettes took some adjusting to. I had been trained by the fashion industry to design clothing using 54” width machine-made fabric with no care for how much scrap material was left over. Using those patterns on my previous handwoven fabric now seemed excessive because of all the unused portions that would be thrown away. So I would have to design new silhouettes specifically to use the traditional narrow-width fabric in its entirety.

I studied the cut of the local traditional costumes and how they shaped their silhouettes using the narrow-width fabric. Everything was boxy, with very few curves, and done as a flat-pattern (not draped like in Western clothing). My favorite are the men’s pants of the Miao tribe in Biasha village. The front and back are the same, and the top is held by a belt with no zipper nor darts. It’s so simple. So I made a women’s version with a higher waistband, pockets, and side closure with frog buttons. (Insert pic) The pant leg width is the same as the width of the fabric, and there is very little waste. 

Designing with traditional handwoven fabrics is also challenging because the fabrics do not stretch. It never occurred to me before that stretch fabrics do not exist in nature. Or that natural fibers wrinkle — that’s how you know it’s 100% natural and not made from cheaper synthetic alternatives.  

Why does this matter? Because synthetic textiles like polyester and nylon are plastics made from petrochemicals that require a huge amount of fossil fuel energy to produce (site source).  They do not allow the skin to breathe, and they will not break down in landfills, where they ultimately end up. It requires 4x (fact check) more energy to produce than natural fibers, and the chemicals required to dye it contain cadmium, lead, chromium, and mercury (site source) that are cancer-causing to workers and the communities that come in contact with the toxic wastewater in rivers. 

In my first attempt at a t-shirt, I created a wide boxy shape cut down the center to accommodate the narrow-width fabric. The sleeves were the length of the width of the fabric, and a fabric frog closure was stitched in the back neckline. (Insert pic)