“You’re just gonna go ahead and create your mark along here,” Sharie Renee said while drawing a line with a marker and ruler on some fabric.
With a steady hand and a vision, the founder of the nonprofit Cleveland Sews showed a group of volunteers how to prepare material for production.
And there’s a lot of material.
“Nine hundred-twenty pounds,” she said with a laugh.
That’s 920 pounds of banners, all from the 2021 NFL Draft in Cleveland.
“Any time the NFL comes to a city there’s a lot of leftover materials, and the NFL Green makes sure that all of those resources go back and stay into the communities,” she said.
She said volunteers took nearly two years to measure out and weigh each piece, and design a product that would be durable and last.
“We were the fortunate recipient of the banners because not a lot of people know what to do with them,” Renee said.
But Renee, whose first job in fashion was creating accessories, saw potential.
“I was making bags out of recycled magazines,” she said. “So, this is definitely kind of bringing me back to my roots of the work that I started doing 20 years ago.”
Now, volunteers like Kylie Gillespie are helping turn the trash into treasure.
“It’s cool to see the potential in something that other people might not have seen to begin with,” she said.
It’s a lot of work.
“And in the room one over, they’re like de-stitching bags one-by-one,” she said, while measuring and cutting fabric. “So, yeah. It’s crazy just to see the time that goes into it.”
T Porter helped with the seam-ripping team in the next room.
“It is a really tough material to work with,” she said. “Because it’s not really cloth-based, so some things you have to treat it differently than you would with like regular fabric.”
That means quality control is extra important. Eventually the pieces will be sewn into tote bags and sold online.
“Nothing is exactly waste, but just new inventions in the making,” Porter said.
The recent high school graduate said she didn’t attend the draft.
“I think I was probably busy with schoolwork and trying to get good grades or something,” she said.
But, the lesson of upcycling is something she said she will keep in her personal playbook.
“Realize you can make anything out of anything and make it resourceful and make it used for your common day,” she said.
NFL Draft banner bags are available to order at clevelandsews.org. Proceeds go toward funding the nonprofit’s education and workforce development programs.
