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:
|
Posted an update: 2025-8-3 16:16:30 25
Reply