Carrboro designer shares ideas for recycling old T-shirts
When River Takada-Capel was in the third grade, her mother taught her to use a sewing machine. As a family, they would go to the PTA Thrift Store in Carrboro, where she grew up, and buy used clothes – not to wear, but to repurpose.
With a sewing machine, Takada-Capel soon learned, there was no such thing as an article of clothing that didn’t fit – there were just raw materials.
“She would find an extra-large linen dress – a nice fabric – and she would take us home and we would make a skirt out of it,” Takada-Capel recalls. “She did a really good job of educating me.”
And Takada-Capel kept learning. She went to Haywood Community College in Waynesville, just west of Asheville, for its professional crafts program, focusing on fiber. She learned hand-weaving, dyeing and sewing, sure, but also business, marketing and product photography. Today, her handmade recycled clothing business RivTak represents a culmination of her mother’s lessons, her experiences in Waynesville and the many, many hours she’s spent sewing secondhand clothes into wholly new garments. Takada-Capel, who lives in Durham, sells these at music festivals, and they’re also on the shelves at seven shops in North Carolina, Virginia and New York. In its seven years, RivTak’s influence has spread.
Possibly this success comes from Takada-Capel’s mindset. She doesn’t find it limiting when a neat material is already part of a shirt, say, or a dress – quite the opposite is true.
“It’s all about finding that cool piece of fabric that inspires me,” she says. “Maybe it’s some weird 1980s shoulder pad jumpsuit, extra-large thing, but I like to get it and remake it into something that someone might wear again.”
The benefit of treating these purchases as raw materials, she says, is that she ends up with fabrics she’d never find at traditional fabric stores.
The other reason she avoids patronizing larger chains like Jo-Ann or Hancock Fabrics is ideological: She likes for her money to go immediately back to the community. Waynesville sports her very favorite thrift store – Second Blessing, a church-run shop that gives its proceeds to a local soup kitchen. In Durham, she’ll buy her fabrics at the Durham Rescue Mission, which has stores in Raleigh, Chapel Hill and Durham, because she knows exactly where her money is going.
“Not only am I shopping and feeding my hoarder habit, but I’m also contributing money to the soup kitchen and helping the community,” Takada-Capel says.
Where to buy
RivTak clothing is sold at these Triangle stores: Vespertine, 118 E. Main St., Carrboro, 919-356-6825, vespertinecafe.com; Lotus Leaf Gifts, 410 W. Geer St., Durham, 919-408-7847, squareup.com/market/lotus-leaf; Gather, 111 W. Chatham St., Cary, 919-378-9172, gathernc.com.
It is also sold online, rivtak.com, and will be sold at the Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival in Pittsboro from Oct. 8-11 and The Bazaar Craft and Art Market in Carrboro from 1-6 p.m. Oct. 18 and Nov. 15.
Do-it-yourself projects
We asked River Takada-Capel, a designer and master thrift-shopper, for some beginner-level projects using a raw material we all have too much of – T-shirts.
T-shirt tote bag: “I feel like everybody has these free T-shirts you get when you do some random thing,” Takada-Capel says. “With those T-shirts, I really like to make bags out of them.” These can be used as grocery or laundry bags – in fact, they’re what Takada-Capel puts customer purchases in if she’s working a festival. Its few easy steps should make it a good project for beginning sewers, she says – just start with a T-shirt you’re OK with ruining in case the first try doesn’t go as hoped.
▪ Fold the T-shirt in half.
▪ Cut out the neckline and sleeves.
▪ Sew up the bottom.
Onesie: “One cute thing I have seen recently is people remaking their clothing into baby clothes,” Takeda-Capel says. “It would give your T-shirt a few more months of wear and you would get to see your baby in your favorite T-shirt.”
▪ Put a T-shirt on the table and put an infant onesie (borrow one or get one from a thrift store) on top of it.
▪ Trace the onesie in pencil over the part of the T-shirt you want to use. Cut it out. Do the same for the back of the onesie.
▪ Sew the sides where the seams are on the onesie. Add buttons at the bottom, or simply make it into an infant-sized T-shirt.
Tank tops, dresses, quilts and pillows: “If someone actually has a T-shirt they want to hold onto, but it’s a little bit raggedy, they could always make it into a tank top,” Takada-Capel says. “I think that’s awesome for dudes to make a tank top out of old T-shirts, but since crop tops are really popular in general, it’s also a hit with girls.” Oversized shirts can be made into dresses, or the graphic from a worn-out T-shirt can be cut out and sewn onto a tote, pillow or quilt.
This story was originally published October 2, 2015 at 6:16 AM with the headline "Carrboro designer shares ideas for recycling old T-shirts."