Making your new one piece swimsuit out of our off-cut fabric

October 21, 2019

I've been looking at the ends of our Econyl ® (recycled plastic) swimwear fabric rolls that have been shelved for a while and finally have made time to get these made into our new ONE PIECE swimsuit.

Rolls of fabric, different colours

Because there are only a few meters of fabric per colour, we've had to manually cut each swimsuit size separately, laying the fabric carefully and marking the patterns individually, so yes, very time consuming but satisfying to see all this fabric get made.

Marking a pattern manually onto pink cloth

We've also had to cut the binding (the straps of the swimsuit) by hand. These are 26mm strips of fabric along the length or selvage of the fabric. Normally we would get a specialist to cut these but because these are not whole rolls, it's not sustainable for them to take on the job.

red and pink fabric binding strips

Luckily, we work with a wonderful team of swimwear manufacturers here in Sydney who have a greed to make them for us. They also find it time consuming because there are many colours and a small quantity of these one piece swimsuits getting made, we reward them with the fair price they ask for.

Most of us would agree that there is a tremendous waste problem that we cannot ignore and trying to solve this requires time and effort.

We also know that time is precious, in a small business where there are several jobs to run at once, time is even more precious.

So next time you see one of our new ALMA ONE PIECE swimsuits, know that they have been made with lots of love and mostly, thinking of the health of our planet in mind.