The Upcycling contest revealed Etsy to be a place where people can go full throttle into new creative territory. We had over a thousand entries! It quickly became clear that we had to raise the bar with our judging process, so we started poring through the items in search of something truly remarkable.

The winners spoke to us on many levels. Of course, there's the environmentally-friendly aspect of upcycling, but we were also looking for a unique vision and a creative process that would tell a story and have a social impact.

1st Place: JackRabbit 

 

The first place winner, JackRabbit's "Wiener Bench," caught our eye because of its striking design. Christine Domanic (aka JackRabbit) posted a description detailing her creative efforts that was both hilarious (picking through the Philly trash for bits of furniture) and socially collaborative (posting a call for dumpster-bound sweaters on Craigslist). The Wiener Bench took materials headed for the trash and transforms them into something completely unexpected — a strange cross between furniture and art installation that emerged from interactions with strangers and their discarded waste. After she finished the piece, Christine got in touch with the sweater donors to show them the full-circle metamorphosis of their redyed yarn into 369 pink wieners.



The Wiener Bench is truly an amusing curiosity. It wasn't until we spoke with Christine that we got the full picture. The inquiring minds here at Etsy HQ had to ask the question everyone was wondering: "Are the 369 wieners REALLY, as your tagline reads, 'rock hard?'" ...To which she replied, "No, they're soft to sit on, and the bench is really comfortable!" So form and function can coincide!

As a student at the Philadelphia University of the Arts, Christine's work utilizes a "childlike sense of humor" to play with the status quo. Christine reveals the ridiculous in our culture's day-to-day acceptance of sexual exploitation and violence by means of a Third Wave Feminist twist. As Chrstine put it, "I like to take a taboo topic and bring it out in the open in a fun kind of way in order to get people talking about issues that really shouldn’t be any big deal to discuss at all."

Inspired by the crassness of back-of-the-newpaper sex worker ads, Christine "advertised" her Wiener Bench around school, posting strange and vaguely illicit flyers around campus. "Everyone is curious about sex and what goes on in those ads in the back of the city’s papers. Would my ads pique people’s curiosity enough to check out my work, and once they saw it, how would it meet their expectations?"

 However, the school's interest was not adequately piqued, so to say. "I was postering for the Wiener Bench really obnoxiously. The school kept taking them down!"

If the campus powers-that-be weren't amused, Etsians have been laughing up a storm. "Making people laugh" was Christine's intention in the first place, but sometimes it's an unsettled laughter. Her other work includes a series of crocheted coffee mugs with the faces of sexual predators living in her city and handguns coated with hand-woven, brightly colored fabrics. Like the jackalope emblem Christine uses, her work is simultaneously lighthearted and disturbing.



Making people laugh and reminding them of the absurdity of modern life is a great way to use Etsy as a source of social commentary. Christine used to operate a brick and mortar store in Pittsburgh before returning to school to finish her degree in crafts (focusing on fibers and mixed media). The shop doubled as a gallery on Fridays, providing a convenient forum to sell her handmade items. However, since going back to a university setting, Christine has forged a community in school and on Etsy, where there's "an open critique." Since it took Christine 6-8 hours a day for a month to make the Wiener Bench, much of the advice she got from other Etsians centered on how to make more benches efficiently. However, Christine isn't interested in making more of the famous Wiener Bench — she simply wants to keep trying out new ideas. At the Bazaar Bizarre, she brought her show-stopper: a crocheted Atari Pitfall system.



2nd Place: Thimblescratch

Thimblescratch's Technofabulous PLASTICOAT TRASHION won second place in the Upcycling contest. We immediately coveted her jacket. 

Tammy Lyons, aka Thimblescratch, discovered a new and revolutionary technique when she heat-fused the trash bags onto an old white blanket ("cigarette burns and all!"). The heat melted the plastic giving it a cool, semi-translucent watercolor effect.

At the time, Tammy was working as a SysAdmin, and pined about juggling a day job and sewing clothing, "you have to save up a bunch of money so can make the junk!" But she has since quit her dayjob to work fulltime on her designs.

Based out of Columbus, IN, Tammy designs and sews all handmade clothing, often with recycled materials and repurposed garments. She describes her living room/workspace as "totally trashed" during her preparation and production for the Upcycling contest. Tammy's coworkers were willing helpers for her Upcycling project, donating their trash for weeks as material for her undertaking. Tammy's home quickly filled up with what some might regard as garbage — but her cats enjoyed as their personal playground.



While having such lively cats is great companionship, Tammy sometimes feels alone in her area because she doesn't "know anybody around here who sews." On the other hand, space is relatively cheap and Tammy and a friend dream about "finding an abandoned factory and starting a workshop." For now, Etsy serves as a place where Tammy can seek out like-minded individuals. However, she'd also like to get the message out to mainstream America. She auditioned for Project Runway, a reality television show in which fashion designers compete for the chance to start their own clothing lines. She was not chosen [note: we are trying to get her to write a piece for The Storque about the experience!]

Because Tammy couldn't sew faster than she can sell and still find time to prepare for Project Runway, she graciously decided to donate her prize, a free booth at the Bazaar Bizarre, to the third place winner.

3rd Place: dismantled 

 

Mallory, aka dismantled, won third place for her Fema dress. Based in New Orleans, Mallory made her first blue tarp dress for a post-Katrina charity event to raise awareness and funds for American wetlands. She says that a year ago "you would see blue tarps everywhere," which translated into an eye-catching and memorable theme for the fashion show portion of the charity. Mallory's offering was a Gone with the Wind-inspired blue tarp dress, which was auctioned off. One of Mallory's day jobs is working at the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans, and "ever since the charity show, the curators started asking me to make another blue tarp dress" for an upcoming Katrina exhibit.

The Upcycling contest dress is made from an actual Fema tarp given to Mallory with a bundle of others after the charity show. "At first it took some time to figure out how to sew tarp material," she states. A self-taught seamstress, Mallory usually "just deconstruct[s] stuff. I like it when I can have rough edges."

Mallory pooled resources with the rest of the New Orleans Craft Mafia in order to attend the Bazaar Bizarre in May. "In the past, the members of the New Orleans Craft Mafia have talked about applying for out-of-town shows as a group and sending one or two representatives to set up. They'd bring along selected goods from each of the interested members, as well as their own products, of course."

While talking to some members of the New Orleans Craft Mafia, we came to understand that more than anything — more than money or supplies or equipment — the crafters, makers and artists of New Orleans need to get their message out. In a way, Mallory and the New Orleans Craft Mafia's presence at the Bazaar Bizarre could be "a mini-boutique bringing NOLA art to these out-of-town events ... We've been talking about how to get the word out about the NOCM to people in other areas, and this could be a good way to do it."

As Mallory explained, "a year and a half after Katrina, a lot of people in other parts of the country still have a really skewed vision of what things are like down here, both in NOLA and along the Gulf Coast (I'm originally from Gulfport, MS, which was also hit very hard by Katrina). The thing is, when I hear stories about people in other parts of the country, it seems like most people think either one of two things about the way things are down here now: that either everything is still completely and utterly decimated, in every part of the city and throughout this area, that we're not getting anywhere with rebuilding, etc, or they think that all of the work is over and things are back to normal. The reality is somewhere in between, and the amount of work left to be done really varies greatly from area to area, neighborhood to neighborhood. I think many of us though, myself included, are past the point of wanting or needing charity for charity's sake. Small business loans or grants and the like are fine, but I'm not sure that I want to encourage people just sending supplies as charity handouts and thinking that is all it takes to help this area's recovery (or even just the recovery of the artists in this area). I think most of us have recovered or replaced whatever supplies were lost and were immediately needed during the last year or so. I think now we're at the point where what we really need down here is the economic recovery that will be brought on in large part by the return of more tourism and more people patronizing locally owned businesses."
 

Honorable Mention: Inklude



We gave an honorable mention to Inklude for their cardboard chair. According to their Etsy shop description, Inklude Studio is a division of Little Friends, Inc. — currently operating as a side project of ColorBurst Screen Printing.

We spoke with April, a manager at Inklude, who explained that the studio provides an outlet for intuitive artists who are developmentally disabled. The artists work at ColorBurst filling orders for clients, and at Inklude, they turn their focus to their own creative projects. The artists collected leaves from outside and designed the pattern in order to screen print the Upholstered Cardboard Chair's white fabric with a green foliage design. The cushions are made from an old table cloth.


(photo from Nomadic Classroom credit: Michael Cataldi)

Rosten Woo, one of our guest judges who voted for the Upholstered Cardboard Chair, remarked, "I like that it's a replicable design." Hopefully, the Upholstered Cardboard Chair will inspire others to give cardboard a shot as a material. Rosten, an educator at the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), works with students to develops programs and exhibits for kids to learn about "places and how they change." One of CUP's projects was the Nomadic Classroom, an innovative project where students from the Academy for Urban Planning to design and construct "components of a classroom that could be assembled, disassembled, and re-assembled to 'house' the students anywhere they wanted to go. The furniture was made entirely of salvaged materials, manipulated with basic tools, and attached with simple mechanical connections."

For another project, "Garbage Problems," CUP worked with New York youth to design and exhibit their research and video documentary — an examination of New York City's waste management system after the closing of Fresh Kills Landfill. Check out the website for more info.

Above all else, the Upcycling contest winners and all of the entrants have inspired the Etsy community — as well as those who helped collect trash, who blogged about their favorite items and read about the contest in other press. As Tammy from Thimblescratch said, "The fact that you can buy non-sweatshop clothing" (and handmade just-about-anything-else, we might add) is the very thing we need "to educate the public about." We just need to let the world know there's a better way. 

Further Resources:
CurrentTV piece on trashion

Trashion Street Team