RE - Vest
RE - Vest
Jo-AMI’s RE-Vest combines sustainability and style in it’s truest form, made from recycled yarn in a timeless cropped silhouette.
This style is a product of a collaboration between Jo-AMI and Cathryn Hall. Cathryn has a PHD in design for recycling with textiles.
I have knitted the new anna vest on my chunky hand powered industrial machine just like the classic style, but have added a new twist to each side of the reversible vest. One side combines Cathryn’s yarn with a navy merino and one side has a slight contrasting turquoise merino, giving you 2 easy looks in one!
This style is available in 3 sizes with a unisex fit:
Size 1 - Length - 44cm Bust - 47cm
Size 2 - Length - 48cm Bust - 49cm
Wool wash recommended
This style is made to order - please allow 2 weeks for your piece to be knitted, constructed, washed, pressed and labelled
All of Cathryn Hall’s yarns contain 50% recycled acrylic and this comes from recycling unwanted jumpers back to fibre. There are lots of these jumpers around and so the purpose of developing these yarns is to explore how we could use this type of waste as a resource. Old acrylic jumpers are often recycled for lower value products, so Cathryn wanted to see if she could design them into a yarn for higher value products and in a way that they then could also be easily recycled again.
The rest of the yarn is 30% new wool and 20% recycled polyester from plastic bottles. The vital part here is the 30% wool. Adding wool to the yarn creates the ‘recycled value’. Recyclers are looking for wool and therefore adding this increases the value of the acrylic. The decision when knitting to add in more wool just makes it more recyclable. Which is something I’ve considered when designing my Jo-AMI pieces for this collection.
The polyester is there for strength and durability. Working with recycled materials has its challenges and therefore the polyester helps the fibres flow through the spinning process easier and creates a stronger yarn.
Another consideration is colour. The recycled acrylic was navy. The turquoise yarn was designed so that it could be easily colour sorted in the recycling process. I.e the colours are not too contrasting and it could be easily added to a colour group. In this case it would be grouped into a blue colour. The more complex the colour the harder it is to recycle. I have therefore made the design decision to use navy, turquoise and black lambswool and merino twisted in with Cathryn’s yarn.
The yarn was made by a smaller commission spinner in Yorkshire and the recycled fibres from jumpers were sourced from Prato, Italy.
Finally, the garment design – Cathryn advised me to try and simplify the number of trims I was using, for example buttons, zips, care labels and locate the ones used in places where it can more easily be cut off. We are not using a care label at all and therefore all the product information is on a cardboard label that will be removed by the customer after purchase.
We hope you love the yarn and design and will wear for a long time, repair when needed (with wool yarn), share and only send for recycling when it is truly worn out.
