Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ericka Leigh. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Ericka, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
The story waiting to be sewn together at my fingertips is personal – an event that changed me and gave me new glasses with which to view the world. My creative process begins with the story I want to tell about different fabrics and the journeys of their life, which is synonymous with the tattered and woven roads we’ve all found ourself on at one point or another. With each stitch, I strive to connect the dots and transform that anger, heartbreak, glee, fear, or breath into an actionable takeaway. I hope to engage the viewer in a difficult conversation about the state of humanity, the state of my mental health, and the state of the environment. With textiles as my medium, I also hope to enlighten the viewer to the way fabric and clothing affects the aforementioned states, because didn’t we all get dressed this morning?
Inspiration speaks to me through news stories, music, textures, and waste. I look for the hard conversations in life – grief, trauma, climate change – and present their delicacy in a tangible, hopeful way.
When I first started sewing, I was mostly making only bowties. While I still make bowties, I also make quilts, tapestries, pennant flags and other fun things. As a sustainabilist, I save all my scraps. I used some of them as stuffing for stuffed animals and other plushie toys, but I’m sure most sewists will tell you that there are more scrapas than can be used. That led me to composting my fabric. According to the EPA, the average American throws away 82 pounds of clothing a year, for a total of 17M pounds annually. There’s a tremendous opportunity there to capture our waste in a smarter way and reuse the resources that went in to making the textile in the first place. Its a huge waste of resources to throw these textiles away.
I began my sustainability career focusing on sustainable agricultural practices. Considering the two things we do everyday – get dressed and eat food – come from the same system, the agriculural system, it made sense to me to try and recycle our textiles back to their start. The most exciting thing about composting our clothes is that I believe we’re connecting the dots where others aren’t in terms of recycling our textiles cradle-to-cradle. Almost no one is talking about composting our clothes as a waste management application, soil amendment, climate solution, and an avenue for social and racial justice.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?
It started with a death, but I’ve learned that deaths are really new beginnings in disguise if you allow them to transform you instead of break you. I started making bowties after my grandfather died, and that was the foundation for Sewn Apart – my business name and artist moniker. A bowtie was one of my grandfather’s signature accessories. I try not to waste anything so I saved my fabric scraps from each bowtie made, which quickly grew to a mountain of scraps. In an effort to reuse the fabric scraps, I started making tapestries, which became a reincarnation of Sewn Apart, and gave me a new way to tell stories. The story waiting to be sewn together at my fingertips is personal – an event that changed me, gave me new glasses with which to see the world. I became interested in environmental work after the death of my best friend. Finding the common ground of my creative outlet and doing right by the planet has been of the greatest joys in my business and creative life.
As a society, we don’t have a way to recycle textiles. Oftentimes, we donate them and call that recycling, but in reality, all we are doing is making our problem someone else’s problem. It’s not sustainable to donate our unwanted clothes en masse to countries throughout Africa and Central and South America. America’s clothing donations choke out foreign local markets and add an abundant amount of waste to foreign landscapes, as well.
I’m proud to be a voice on this issue and work on climate solutions in waste reduction, waste management, and soil restoration.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
My 20s and early adult life were very heavy and traumatic. My best friend of 17 years died when I was 24 and for me, that was the moment everything changed. It was such a devastating, heartbreaking, and life changing event. Hers was the first in a series of deaths I would experience in my 20s. However, like a lotus flower, one can bloom from the muck. I look back at that period and feel proud of myself for finding a way through. I started painting and writing more, trying to work out my grief in a creative manner. I also used fashion as an avenue for self-healing by dressing better than I felt. When you look good, you feel good, and when you feel good, you have the power to change. I leaned on my parents and other friends who were very supportive. I sought therapy for my grief and PTSD for having experienced the sudden losses. It took a while to heal myself, but slowly and surely, I did. I’m really proud of myself for taking those steps because it would have been way easier to get lost in that volume of grief. Experiencing these losses changed the trajectory of my life and I think it shows a lot of resilience to incorporate such tragedy into one’s life and one’s job. None of it was easy, and I’m really glad I made it to the other side.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
This answer plays off the previous question, but there is no timeline and we are all on our own journey. I bought into the bs that the perfect life falls into this sequence of meeting your partner at 20, falling in love, getting married and having kids by 30, and the dream career just comes naturally. Everyone truly is on their own path and having all the boxes checked is an absurd and unrealistic ideal. Life is not perfect, even if some things feel perfect at the moment. I felt on top of the world before my friend died; I felt confident in the direction of my career at that time, I was traveling and having a lot of fun. Everything changed in an instant and I had to unlearn a lot of things, but mostly around career and work. I switched career paths after she died, earned a Master’s degree, and started in a new direction. it was scary and I felt behind, I felt that I was getting a later start on my career. I hadn’t really been told that it was okay to switch careers and start at the bottom again. I used to feel shame for having switched careers and seeing folks younger than me further along than I was. Now that I’m older, I don’t think there’s any shame at all in taking care of yourself and starting fresh. Everything happens in due time and the throey that you’ll have it all together by a certain age is a giant myth.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.sewnapart.com
- Instagram: @erickaloveleigh & @
sewn.apart - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/erickaloveleigh
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erickaleighmct/
- Twitter: n/a
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvZ9-Kvb-SKwdEg-ZqUJNxg
- Yelp: n/a
- Other: Medium – https://medium.com/@erickaleigh
Image Credits
Photos by (in no particular order): Ericka Leigh; Regina as the Photographer; Von.co; Chanel Fernandez