Radha Weaver grew up around textiles, studied costume design in college, and worked in the textile industry for 15 years. She left the apparel industry and started her first quilt with fabric from her stash. Now inspired by transformation, she creates art with upcycled textiles under the handle Sewing through Fog.
Why textiles? Why quilts?
Textiles were my first love. I grew up on a Hindu commune in Northern California and I still remember playing dress-up in the vibrant threads of my mom’s silk saris. Textiles led me to study costume design in college, and the business of textiles – specifically denim – took over my life for 15 years with a corporate job at Levi’s. I loved my job but working in the apparel industry during the rise of fast fashion, visiting huge denim mills and factories in China and Bangladesh, seeing the impact of producing new textiles, it was a constant struggle with my values.
I finally left the industry in 2021 with severe burnout. And on my first free day, I turned my second bedroom (i.e. pandemic home office) back into a sewing room and started making my first quilt with fabric from my stash. I knew nothing about quilting, but I had shelves of fabric I’d collected through my travels, and still had those saris from my childhood. During the pandemic I watched my stepmom teach my niece to quilt and thought, I could do that. I’d been sewing since I could walk (skills passed down from my great grandma who was a seamstress in NY), and I knew if it was made of fabric then I could make it.
Quilting was meant to be a six-month project while I figured out what to do with my life. But once I started, I couldn’t stop. It was a revelation, like painting but with textiles. Now, two and a half years later, I’m still trying to figure out what to do with my life, but I have a much better idea, and that idea involves quilting.
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What do you want to communicate through your art?
I spent the first year of quilting stumbling around, trying to find my voice. It clicked when I did an exercise where I wrote down my values ─ authentic, environmentally conscientious, and inclusive (with just a touch utilitarian) ─ and I realized I needed my art to communicate this. What this meant was, after everything I’d seen, I couldn’t support new fabric production. But what I could do was address some of the problems I helped create, specifically textile waste, by quilting and inspiring others to quilt with upcycled jeans.
I sometimes joke that this is penance for my apparel career, but quilting with denim isn’t a sacrifice or punishment. Denim is the most amazing transformational fabric, it’s strong and soft and warm, it gets better every time it’s used, it was made for quilting.
What inspires you?
I’m inspired by the idea of transformation. Before anything else, I’m inspired by the texture, weave, and then color of the fabric. I get joy from transforming unexpected materials and combining unlikely textures. The pattern of the final quilt is an outcome of the fabric, and almost never the inspiration. This is why, when I started quilting, I was so confused by quilting cotton. How could anyone possibly limit themselves to one weave, one texture, one weight, when there was a world of possibilities out there?
What do you do differently? What is your signature that makes your work stand out as yours?
I only work with upcycled or secondhand materials, mostly denim. [I buy new thread because my sewing machine repair guy has convinced me good thread is the only way my Bernina will last forever.]
My signature is how I transform my materials, how I use upcycled jeans in a way that is clean and modern. Upcycling is sometimes stereotyped as looking worn, gimmicky, DIY, crafty (in the negative use of the word), but I think that’s silly. A garment is just a piece of fabric that has already been cut into shapes. There is no reason why that piece of fabric can’t become anything it wants to.
When it comes to creating, are you more of a planner or an improviser?
Textiles are my ultimate medium because they are forgiving. Fabric is never final, it doesn’t get used up, it just gets transformed, and can always be transformed again. I create through experimentation and improv, and textiles are perfect for this. They can become anything if you know how to work them.
Describe your creative space.
I love my sewing studio, but my creative space is SCRAP SF (https://www.scrap-sf.org), a non-profit creative reuse center where I volunteer every week. Creative reuse centers accept donations of arts and crafts supplies and give them to teachers for arts education and/or sell them back to the public to keep them out of landfills. I find about 50% of my materials at SCRAP which is like an Aladdin’s Cave meets garage sale meets your coolest grandma’s attic. When you only use upcycled or secondhand materials, it can be hard to plan. But my favorite thing is seeing what was donated at SCRAP each week and figuring out how to use it in my art.
One of my goals is to connect more people with the secondhand fabric market so I created a resource called Thrift your Fabric (https://www.sewingthroughfog.com/thriftyourfabric) that’s an interactive map with hundreds of secondhand fabric stores and creative reuse centers across the globe.
Can you tell us about the inspiration and process of one of your works? How does a new work come about?
Early in 2023 I was putting together a guide on grainline and types of weaves and after about two weeks of drawing weave patterns in Adobe Illustrator I grabbed some denim, cut it in to strips and started weaving it. I experimented with width and color and quilted the final pieces to finish them.
Some were bound, some turned into pillows, bags or little cards. When each weave project was done, I would have little bits leftover that were too short to weave, so I cut them into squares and began to make raw-edge patchwork and checkerboard designs.
These three classic designs ─ weave, checkerboard and patchwork ─ became the basis of my Quilt your Jeans class (https://www.sewingthroughfog.com/quiltyourjeans) where I teach how to deconstruct a pair of jeans and then turn them into art or functional objects for your home.
What was the biggest challenge that you encountered on your creative journey? What did you learn from it?
Calling myself an artist. Even today it makes me uncomfortable to talk about my work as art. I was raised to be responsible and work hard and accomplish things. And art feels frivolous and self-indulgent. Not for others, I greatly admire other artists, but for myself. This has made me realize how critical I am of myself and the sometimes impossible standards and expectations I set for myself.
If you could live during a different artistic movement other than now, which one would you choose? Why?
Since my first art was costume design, I’m instead going to tell you what historical time period I would have liked to live during based on the clothing. That would be the 1830’s. Not because I liked the style of that period but because sloping shoulders were the height of fashion and I have very sloped shoulders.
Tell us about your blog and/or website. What do you hope people will gain by visiting?
My website is a constantly evolving place for resources to help you quilt more sustainably – there is the Thrift your Fabric (https://www.sewingthroughfog.com/thriftyourfabric) interactive map to help you find secondhand fabric stores, my blog (https://www.sewingthroughfog.com/blog) has fun projects and tips on quilting with denim, and I have classes and patterns that empower you to work with upcycled materials. The best way to keep up to date is to join my newsletter (https://tidy-king-54580.myflodesk.com/g8c55f7ve0), or you can always follow me on IG @sewingthroughfog (https://www.instagram.com/sewingthroughfog).
Interview posted December 2023
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