Second Chances
Crispina ffrench. Photo by Malcolm Brown.
Most eighteen-year-olds think they’re ready to change the world, but don’t have the staying power. Not Crispina ffrench. She has resurrected thrift shop sweaters into toys, blankets, rugs, clothing, ottomans, and more, for 35 years. Along the way, she’s generously taught her craft to scores of others, documented and published all her techniques, breathed life into the idea of more sustainable design and manufacturing practices at some important players in the apparel world, and played a role in some big changes in the fashion ecosystem. And she’s not nearly done.
As a young art student, Crispina complained to her late father John, a teacher and a well-recognized artist in his native Ireland, that she hated the felting technique she was required to master by a professor. She was not happy with the muted tones of her hand-dyed rovings, and miserable about the wet, soapy process that was chilling her to the bone in Western Massachusetts. John, ever an inventive problem solver, burst out with an admonition to fetch some wool sweaters from Goodwill. The heat and tumble of the family’s washer and dryer, he said, would yield all the felt she could possibly need.
Right he was. Recycling sweaters into felt met Crispina’s needs on many levels. All manner of bright colors and vivid patterns were readily available. The process was easy. Supporting a worthy cause like Goodwill was admirable. In a world quite new to now-ubiquitous things like mandatory glass bottle recycling, reusing fabric seemed like an important thing to try. “I was convinced I could have a big impact on the world – that I would slow down all the wastefulness somehow,” she remembers.
The fantastical toy creatures Crispina made with her recycled felt, dubbed Ragamuffins, sold as fast as she could make them. Before too long, she was buying “loads of sweaters,” and not all of them felted well in the laundry. When the piles of material too light and loose to sew into toys became an obstacle, Crispina experimented with collaged mittens, blankets and sweaters. Her business expanded accordingly, university course work notwithstanding.
When frayed or spotted (or downright unattractive) bits of sweaters cast away in the making of all of the above began to accumulate, Crispina improvised again. With a handmade loom cobbled together out of an old wooden stretcher meant to support a painting, some wonky finishing nails and a lot of optimism, she made her first potholder rugs. “I realized that I could use pretty much every bit of fiber that came through the studio. It was sort of a zero-waste scenario before we had that name for it,” Crispina relates, with traces of surprise in her voice even decades later.
Crispina wasted neither fiber nor time pursuing her studio practice. “Thanks mostly to all the people who loved my work, I graduated from college debt-free. In 1989, after graduation, I wrote $25,000 in orders at my first American Craft Council show. I quit my side-job as a waitress and I never looked back.”
Two years later, she had 40 employees. Sweaters came in by the dozens from Goodwill, but also in 1,000-pound bales from garment graders. “We sorted by color and quality. The best sweaters went for blankets, medium grades for toys and mittens, and the roughest stuff for rugs.” With this kind of sourcing volume and careful sorting, Crispina’s patchwork compositions acquired the qualities they have today, with textures and hues playing off of each other often in tone on tone harmonies and sometimes in witty contrasts. A vocabulary of hearts and other graphic symbols brought another visual layer to the work, deployed in various scales from modest single square motifs to patchwork shapes that run edge-to-edge.
In the early years of her studio practice, Crispina often sensed a bit of polite alarm when customers learned that the goods were made of recycled clothing. A question was sometimes voiced: “Is this clean?” Back in those days, she needed to develop descriptions of the material and the process that reassured her audience of the value of what she was doing. Clearly, that is no longer the case. Recycling of textiles and yarns, and resale of clothing, are increasingly part of the mainstream, with apparel companies like Eileen Fisher and Patagonia taking a lead position. The Eileen Fisher Renew program, which recycles, remakes and resells clothing brought into their stores by customers, is widely admired, and something Crispina helped to shape.
She met designer and entrepreneur Eileen Fisher at a conference in 1995, where they discussed the potential of a recycling program. Prior to launching Renew, the company hired Crispina to work with its design team for about 18 months in 2008-9. The short term result of the collaboration was a portfolio of product made from Renew garments and textiles.
The long term results are more important. Crispina’s insight into efficient use of reclaimed garments brought about the fine-tuning of sourcing and manufacturing in ways that anticipated their eventual second life. The fiber content of threads and fabric, seam placement, pattern development, and more, were influenced by the collaboration. Putting these insights into company-wide practice helped the company launch its Irvington, NY “tiny factory,” where the Renew program is centered. With over 1.2 million garments passing through the program, the company is leading the way into a new phase of environmental responsibility which is also practical. “Like me, Eileen turned what would probably have ended up in landfill into a business opportunity. The culture and values of that company are so notable, thanks in part to Eileen herself, who is so open to engaging with good ideas,” comments Crispina.
Crispina’s studio currently employs five people, some of whom go back and forth between the serigraphy practice founded by her parents and now run in collaboration with her sister, Sofia Hughes. Working with high quality recycled wool garments, currently less plentiful thanks to the popularity of synthetic fleece, must be balanced with Crispina’s teaching gigs at FIT and other schools, the development of her own soon-to-premier online courses for aspiring makers, and a monthly subscription service of boxed DIY recycled craft projects. There’s also demand from textile corporations like New England sock maker Darn Tough who are seeking inventive strategies to reduce and reuse manufacturing waste.
Crispina is energized by this new phase of her career, which is consistent with her initial desire to “slow down all the wastefulness.” She comments, “By teaching people to do things, they become empowered to make, to think, to be creative. It’s whole new realm of creative possibility that makes people participants in the ecosystem, not just getting people to buy more. Everybody and everything gets a new chance at getting it right.”