As a young American student with little funds and a surplus of creativity, the greatest barrier between me and gorgeous handmade hanfu has been fabric. Large craft stores where I live are filled to the brim with colorful calicos and fun fleeces but contain very few apparel fabrics. The fabrics available are expensive beyond my limited budget.
The expense of the fabric seems to contribute largely to the prices of hanfu for sale online as well—larger items such as ao and mamianqun, which usually require much more fabric, are quite expensive. Crafting them for yourself by hand out of the fabrics available on the mainstream market is almost as expensive. Creating the full silhouettes and elegant drapes of hanfu takes a lot of fabric, and because of this, it costs a lot.
So, I have turned to another one of my passions—reusing old items found in thrift stores. (Thrift stores, for anyone unfamiliar, are stores that sell an eclectic combo of used clothing, furniture, teacups, books, jewelery, curtains, and pretty much anything else they can get their hands on, often at a lower price than the retail value. The good ones are not glamorous shops, but they are fun and weird and always full of interesting things. It's a favorite passtime of mine to go wandering through these shops in search of rare treasures) Full of strange fabrics, soft old sheets, and richly colored curtains, thrift stores contain a treasure trove of textiles useful to any amateur seamstress.
For soft and colorful layers, thrifted sheets work perfectly. They provide the nice texture of underlayers or lining and the gentle pastels common to hanfu. Most sheets I have been able to thrift are between 10 and 20 USD, depending on size and material, which is far less expensive than that much quality fabric would be in a fabric store. Even buying sheets new is very expensive, but thrift stores take that cost down significantly.
For example, I used a pretty green thrifted fabric to construct a simple shirt (a Jiao Ling Shang Ru) as an underlayer. In its previous life it was a sheet, so it is super soft, warm and comfortable against skin. I used a bit of the embroidery on the hem to border the bottom edge of the garment as well as create cuffs on the sleeves. The cost of the sheet was about ten USD, and I only used a very little part of it. If anyone is interested, the pattern I used was the one found in this article by Ling:
Hanfu Making(3) - Ruqun Cutting & Sewing Patterns - Newhanfu.
I made my Jiao Ling Shang Ru using the measurements in that article, and then added on the cuff embroidery mentioned previously.
Another textile that I’ve found useful is curtains. I find that curtains are often made of stiffer fabric and can have several layers. A lovely blue one I found in a thrift store near my house yielded three separate fabrics. First, a lighter muslin, which can be used to line other fabrics or create underlayers. Second, a soft fleecy layer originally used to make the curtains darker, which could be the inner layer of an ao jacket, or some other warmer coat. Third, the eye-catching blue taffeta outer layer, which I made a mamianqun out of. The whole curtain was about ten USD.
While thrift store fabrics can be pretty great, there are definitely some downsides. First of all, the fabrics you find can sometimes be damaged or faded. However, with a quick dye or repair job, or some clever seams, the lower price still outweighs these imperfections. Secondly, colors and patterns are quite limited. Most sheets are light pastel, and it’s sometimes difficult to find a curtain that won’t blatantly look like a curtain when you wear it. Again, however, a bit of embroidery or a splash of colorful dye can spruce up these shortcomings pretty quickly.
Beyond the obvious monetary advantages of used fabrics and thrift store finds, thrift stores are also super good for our communities and environments. Here are some cool statistics I found online:
- About 1/3 of resale stores are not-for-profit, supporting causes like hospice care and community centers
- Only 14.7% of the 17 million tons of textiles wasted each year get recycled—thrift stores help reuse that fabric before it ends up in the landfill.
- The fast fashion industry (where clothes go in and out of fashion and new outfits are required for each “season”) accounts for about 10% of greenhouse gas emissions. Thrift stores help reduce the amount of clothing that needs to be made, helping reduce these emissions.
I hope this article inspires you to head out into your local thrifting community in search of your next project! Let me know what you make in the comments 🙂
