Visiting Oasis Senior Center
Photo taken by Maggie Zhang
This past January, the Refashioned Group visited the nearby senior center, Oasis Senior Center in Newport Beach, to host a short workshop where participants learned an easy method to reuse old clothing material to create something new: a denim keychain! Americans generate around sixteen million tons of waste every year, piling high in landfills and crowding our beautiful oceans. To reduce this waste, it is important to find ways to upcycle our old clothes. This can be done by passing on these clothes to second-hand users or by repurposing the material to create anything from a cute accessory to a toy or to a garment. The fabric keychain activity described before is a great example of how simple, quick, and fun it can be to upcycle. Feel free to follow the steps at the bottom of this article to create your own keychain!
Teresa Zuo presenting the key chains
At the workshop, we had the opportunity to not only spread awareness about fashion sustainability and to educate the community, but we also had the special opportunity to connect with senior citizens through shared interest in crafts. While crafting, our members had the chance to receive insight into what the older population thinks about sustainability and the environmental impacts of being wasteful. Many of them were incredibly passionate and interested in information about being environmentally aware. Our workshop was able to serve a dual purpose of being educational but also bringing the older generation into current events and tapping into their inner creative.
Fabric Keychain
Materials: scrap fabric, fabric glue or sewing thread and needle, buttons/beads, keychain
Sketch out a simple design–simple shapes work best!
Choose any type of leftover fabric to upcycle as the base of your keychain
Cut your chosen fabric into your design
Decorate with other scrap materials like buttons, threads, or beads
Find a long, thin strip of fabric and fold it in half and glue the edges together
Take your newly made tag and glue it to the back of your design
Attach a keychain to the tag and that’s it!
Examples of the keychains