COLLAB: Vacilando Studios x Bad Nana’s Bandanas No-Waste Quilted Bandanas
Over the past few years, we’ve accumulated a significant amount of fabric scraps leftover from making our quilts, pillows, and quilt coats. These pieces of fabric are perfectly useable, but they’re too small for our quilt designs and too big to throw away. In an effort to keep this fabric out of landfills and to continue the long tradition of quilting with whatever is available, we’ve been saving each and every scrap of fabric, waiting to repurpose them into something beautiful and useful.
After putting out a call for ideas about how to transform our remnants, Jen Moses of Bad Nanas Bandanas (whose face quilts I’ve long admired) reached out with a proposition to collaborate on a collection of quilted bandanas made out of our fabric scraps. She sent a couple of samples so we could try them out - as soon as I put one on, I was completely sold. Super cozy, easy to wear, more interesting than a regular bandana, and more practical than a scarf. Plus it’s a quilt you can wear, which as you know from our quilt coats, is basically our new M.O. here at Vacilando.
We shipped almost 30 pounds of our fabric remnants to Jen’s studio in Woodstock, VT where she got to work washing, sorting, designing, cutting, piecing, quilting, and assembling 41 quilted bandanas over the course of two months. What she created was a cohesive collection of one-of-a-kind wearable works of art inspired by Vacilando quilt designs, but with her own Bad Nana’s twist of bold, unexpected color combinations.
Jen shared more on her thoughtful approach and her process:
“The first goal for this collection was for it to be a reflection of Vacilando’s minimal and modern style. Before there was even fabric in hand, I spent time scrolling through Laura’s IG feed and website looking for design concepts that would translate well as a bandana. With this in mind, and the scrap fabric provided by Vacilando, my job was to create a collection of quilted scrap bandanas.
Secondly, I wanted this collection to look “put together” despite the fact that it came from scraps. When working with scraps, your ideas are always contingent on what you have available for colors, if there is enough of it, are the sizes big enough, etc. So truly, in the end, the fabric ends up making a lot of the decisions for you. This kind of making turns out finished products that are unique, and somewhat unpredictable and exciting. I started with the piecing that required the largest widths of scraps then worked my way down. Things tend to get really scrappy after the controlled piecing is done and you get a look at the bits and pieces of what is left over. A couple of the bandanas on the collection are compilations of these “leftovers”.
Construction elements that I considered throughout the whole process included keeping the piecing and the stitching minimal, as we wanted these bandanas to be pieced like a quilt but also lightweight. All bandanas were lined with the same lightweight chambray that gets used in Vacilando’s quilt coats. Seeing the collection all come together, and the way the chambray truly complemented and even accentuated each and every color combination was a delight. In the end, this collaboration turned out to be a fun remix of Vacilando aesthetic and little bit Bad Nanas color funkiness, resulting in 41 individually unique quilted bandanas.”
