Upcycled pillow stuffing made from my synthetic clothing

Upcycled pillow stuffing

Remember when I wrote about synthetic clothing fibers getting into our oceans? Since then, more articles have been penned and published on the subject. From science journals to bloggers, the unease has grown.

Knowing the plastic fibers of polyester, nylon and acrylic, were travelling down the drain and going into the ocean left me feeling irksome. I addressed this in a blog post last year hoping to kinda get over it and not feel as guilty. But I have been unable to shake it. Slowly, I have been collecting all my synthetic clothing into a pile in the closest preferring to wear items from my wardrobe made of natural fibres like cotton and cool. Eventually ALL the synthetic shirts, dresses and skirts from my wardrobe were pulled from my wardrobe. Except underwear...it is near impossible to get underwear without some form of elastic.

I had no intentions of donating my unwanted plastic clothing to a local charity store. I’d just be dumping a problem onto someone else. Plus learning about how a portion of the unwanted clothes that are not sold at charity stores are either processed and sent abroad or worse, buried in landfill here in Australia. You can read more about why sending our second hand clothing abroad to countries like Ghana is a problem and how it suffocates local textile industries here.

I decided to take inspiration from Sustainability in Style and turn used clothing into stuffing. Hers were used for an upcycled fabric bolster, mine was to fill pillows.



Unlike Sustainability in style, I did not cut mine into strips rather keeping them in as is to stuff into the pillows as is. They were still wearable clothes. It remind me of backpacking trips and camping holidays where I stuffed my clothes into a t-shirt to use as a makeshift pillow.  My synthetic clothes filled three pillow cases. 

The pillow casing was made from used hessian and they sit on an old church pew at the entrance to our house. If you came into our home, you’d have no idea that the pillows are stuffed with old clothes.




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