How to recycle your fabric poster

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Today I’m at Benelearn 2017, the Belgium-Netherlands-Luxembourg machine learning conference. Here’s me next to my poster:

 

As usual I printed the poster on fabric, growing my collection of fabric posters even further:

 

But you might have noticed something else about the picture… Yes, I’m wearing a skirt made from one of my old posters!

Here are some frequently asked questions & answers about this development.

 

Did you make it yourself?

No, the skirt was made by REpost Science, a company in the Netherlands that upcycles fabric posters into bags, gadgets and even clothes. I first heard about it through @GeomechSteph (thanks!)

 

Is it comfortable?

Yes. I asked REpost Science to create the skirt following the model of a Comma skirt I already had (see a better quality photo on Zalando):

So the fit is very comfortable. The fabric is comfortable as well – the poster skirt has a lining from a regular non-poster material. The lining also removes any transparency of the poster fabric.

I

It has pockets!

Yes! The original Comma skirt has pockets too, which is why I love it and why I vowed never to buy clothes without pockets again.

On the subject of pockets, you might also want to check eShakti, which has lots of customizable and affordable skirts and dresses WITH POCKETS (thanks to @Doctor_PMS for the tip!)

 

Do a lot of people notice it?

I’ve had quite a few compliments and questions, but I think less people notice it than I had originally thought. In part I think this is because I don’t feel like I’m wearing anything unusual (since I wear exactly this skirt but in a different color/fabric more often). And in part it’s because most people don’t really care what you are wearing. See for example this story where a woman wore the same outfit for a year and nobody noticed.

I did have a lot of nice comments on Twitter too! Here are some favorites:

 

 

Online, it gets noticed a lot! At one point it was the most popular post I have written, and in the last quarter it even surpassed the all-time-popular How I Fail interview with Hal Daumé III.

I also discovered I don’t really understand how to use Twitter Analytics – is there a list of “all time popular” tweets? But compared to my other tweets in June 2017, the tweet about the blog post seems quite popular:

Are you the first person to do this?

No! Here’s Rolf Hut and his suit from posters, and actually how I found out about REpost_poster (the company that created my skirt)!

I also saw pillows, bags and other accessories in my Twitter feed – if you are the owner of any of those, please share the tweet and I’ll add it here!

Is it machine washable?

Yes! Because the skirt needed a bit more than poster, I had some leftover “scraps”, which I decided to use to investigate what happens when you wash the poster fabric. Since it was an experiment anyway, I thought I’d raise the level of difficulty with sriracha and garlic sauce – the first things I saw in the kitchen I thought would be difficult to get out of white fabric.

These made some terrible stains. I also added coffee, since that’s what I’m most likely to spill on myself. I didn’t have any red wine in the house, but I could try that in a next experiment if there is interest.

Into the washing machine it goes! This is the normal cycle I use for all my clothes, 40 degrees Celcius, with regular color detergent.

All good again! At first I could still see hints of the sriracha, but after drying, these disappeared.

So, now I can safely bring the skirt with me to the next conference – MICCAI in Quebec City, Canada in September!

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