Duchars Sara - ReCraft: how to turn second-hand stuff into beautiful things for your home, family and friends

Buttonbag HQ (Left to right): Maddy, Sara, Sarah, Jody, Paula, Anna, Naomi

In the early days, we used to cut all the fabric by hand on the kitchen table and by Friday evening every surface in both our houses would be covered with scraps of material, wool and sequins as we got ready for the weekend craft market. As we got bigger we started looking for premises and moved into a studio near London Fields in Hackney - not far from the heart of the old textile manufacturing district in the East End. In fact some of our favourite suppliers are just round the corner.

Ive always loved making things. Many of my earliest memories are of things I made; a viking village populated by peg dolls, glove puppets, a zoo out of lolly sticks and plasticine, dolls house furniture from matchboxes, a canoe for my Action Man. My parents taught me a lot of stuff. My mum showed me how to knit and my dad, who had trained as a tailor, taught me how to sew when I was about six. I remember him showing me how to cut a pattern for perfectly-fitting trousers for my Action Woman. He was also pretty good at dressing-up costumes (left). I think both me (Punch and Judy show) and my sister (the crocodile) might have won prizes for these ones. I still love making stuff. In fact I get a bit nervous if Im not in the middle of a making project.

Sarah

When I was little my mum used to make all my dresses, and she would also make a matching dress for my doll. She always had a project on the go, and, consequently, so did I, be it sewing, knitting, crocheting or embroidery. My main love was sewing, and encouraged by my mum, I started making my own clothes as a teenager and this led me to train as a tailor, and then to work in the costume department of the Royal Opera House. I still always like to have a current project, and encourage my children to do the same. As well as the actual enjoyment of making things, I still get the same sense of achievement now as I did when I was a child.

Sara

ReCraft, the book, arose from a project Buttonbag undertook to design a range of craft kits for the charity Oxfam. We visited our local branch and bought armfuls of all the things you can find in just about any second-hand shop: cardigans, mens stripey shirts, old records, plastic bangles, denim jackets, floral curtains, tweed skirts, a lonely cup and saucer. We took them back to Buttonbag HQ and set about turning our finds into beautiful things for our friends, families and homes. Jumpers became tea cosies, shirts were turned into metres and metres of beautiful bunting, old records were melted into funky bowls, a penguin hatched from a woolly black jumper, the cardigan was transformed into baby bootees and a matching hat and mittens. It was a hugely rewarding and creative process and resulted in a range of ReCraft kits now available through Oxfam. We also realized we had more than enough ideas for a book. ReCraft is that book.

The increasing popularity of craft during the last decade seemed to take a lot of people by surprise, but were pretty sure that the new-found love for all things handmade is not a fad. At Buttonbag we think craft is a vital antidote to todays fast-paced life whose rhythms are dictated by consumerism and technology. We are not anti-tech our children play computer games, our husbands covet all the latest gadgets and we spend a good part of every day on the computer, phone and internet. But sewing, knitting and making stuff help balance it all out.

Craft means a lot of different things to different people but to us its about making things. Its about the process of making them as well as the end result, creating as well as the creation. In fact, quite often we dont know exactly what we are making until weve made it. (And sometimes we dont like what weve made.) Its about experimenting with fabric, sewing, glue, paper and wool.

ReCraft takes this one step further. Its about using your hands and imagination to give old things a new lease of life. Its a way of recycling things you might otherwise throw away or things other people have given away. Over the next pages we want to show you how even the most uninspiring objects can be transformed by the work of your own hands; holey jumpers, old shirts, dusty books, chipped cups, battered spoons, floral curtains, scratched records and broken games can become soft toys, candles, secret boxes, precious jewels, cushions and bags.