MA Student Molly Davies shares her love of Mark+Fold for Community Clothing notebooks, made here in the UK from denim scraps.
We caught up with Molly to ask her a bit more about her brilliant work.
Your MA focused on pre-consumer denim waste. Why that, specifically?
Post-consumer waste gets a lot of attention - the jeans in the back of your wardrobe, the charity shop piles. Pre-consumer is different. It's the scraps, the off-cuts, the fabric left on the cutting room floor before a garment ever reaches a shop. There's an enormous amount of it, and we're not talking about it enough.
Where did your material come from?
Two bags of denim scraps from Hiut, who make from their factory in Cardigan, West Wales. That was the whole palette - nothing new, no virgin fibre. The constraint was the point.
How did Mark+Fold end up in the project?
I'd visited a paper mill in Brixton called John Purcell Paper and we had a talk by one of the staff about the history of paper. They pointed me towards James Cropper who mentioned Mark+Fold denim notebooks to me. I went home, Googled, and ordered one. Then two more. All three became my sketchbooks for the final six months - drawings, paintings, stitch samples, process notes. The amber stitching on your covers happened to match the amber stitching on my denim samples. When everything was laid out together, it looked like one project.
How do you use the different sizes?
The smaller notebook lives with me day-to-day - notes, ideas, anything I catch on the move. The larger one is the proper sketchbook: process diary, drawings, samples, and the full thinking.
What's next - for you, and for denim?
I'm job hunting on the sustainability side of the industry. My focus is new dyeing methods and laser recycling - I recently visited LaundRE in London, the UK's only fully sustainable textile recycling and laser facility. The future has to be about repurposing what already exists. We've overproduced for decades; the material is already here. The work now is to reintegrate it properly into the mainstream — and to call out greenwashing wherever we see it.
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Our denim notebooks feature a cover made from 100% recycled denim, using off-cuts from Community Clothing, the Blackburn-based social enterprise we're proud to work closely with. You can follow Molly's work on Instagram at @molly_elizabeth_davies.
If you have work to share, we always love to see it — simply tag us @markandfold or drop us a line.
