Welcome to Waste(D) + Sock Stories

Textile waste, upcycling and reuse education

It started with waste and overproduction.

My experience of waste began long before I ever called myself a designer. In the 1980s in Canada, as recycling programmes were being embedded into communities, I became attuned to environmental issues and threw myself into any local activity that involved sorting, collecting, or picking up trash. In 1987, I received a “Friends of the Environment” award from Pinery Provincial Park—a small but formative recognition that confirmed what I already felt: that what we do with what we discard matters.

That mindset was shaped at home as much as it was outside. My parents, who were old enough to be my grandparents, grew up during the Depression in Canada (Dad) and the Second World War in East End, London (Mum). They were both extremely mindful with resources, and very little was ever wasted in our household. Leftovers were reimagined, objects repaired, clothing mended and re‑mended. I grew up understanding that materials carried value beyond their first life.

My creative life grew in parallel to this environmental consciousness. From childhood through to adulthood my commitment to reuse has been lifelong. Since the mid‑90s I’ve been professionally engaged in upcycling. It began with re‑making vintage and deadstock fashion found in local second‑hand shops and sourcing seconds from Montreal. During my fashion design training, I became hyper‑focused on reworking denim, only to be told by my professors that there was “no market” for it. My internal response: you couldn’t be more wrong—this is the future of the fashion industry.

Around the same time, in the late 1990s, I was dating someone who worked for a major waste management company in Ontario. Through that relationship I visited almost every type of waste facility in southern Ontario and northern Michigan: transfer stations, recycling depots, and general landfills ranging from small open pits to sprawling sites hundreds of acres wide, tucked between state prisons in the U.S. I saw every kind of waste imaginable—animal, medical, automotive and metal, paper, textiles and clothing, general household debris. Standing in those landscapes, I realised these were future gravesites for materials.

At one of those landfills, I understood that if I was going to be a designer in this lifetime, I had a responsibility for what I put into the world. That moment changed the trajectory of my work. I knew I needed to understand materials much more deeply, which led me into further studies in textiles and, eventually, into a long-term entanglement with waste and reuse that defines my practice today.

Fast forward to now: I have over 25 years of observing and transforming waste, a journey further sharpened by my specialisation in the reuse of hosiery and sock manufacturing waste. As a textile waste designer, I look to re‑route waste into new textiles, methods, strategies, and systems that can spark and activate reuse in others. My career has expanded well beyond the borders of fashion and design; I now move as an artist, researcher, writer, and educator, working with upcycling systems and creative reuse across contexts.

Having recently completed a practice‑based PhD in upcycling, I’ve chosen to use this Substack as the format where I share the insights, knowledge, and experience that have emerged through years of practice. My hope is that these stories and frameworks can serve as both resource and catalyst—for your own Waste(D) questions, and for whatever re‑making practices you are called to build next.

1. Why this, why now

Upcycling is one of the fastest‑growing movements in sustainable fashion and design, yet many independent practitioners working with waste lack access to resources, frameworks, and mentorship that speak to their realities. Most re-making knowledge generated in this sector is happening outside schools and higher education. People are tackling textile waste, generating solutions and reuse models through local action. Social media feeds are flooded with reels and posts that showcase upcycling’s power in the age of fast fashion, offering a steady stream of inspiration and ideas. Yet this knowledge remains fragmented, with few formal frameworks or systems to help share connect and scale its value.

I aim to create a transformative space that captures and amplifies the field of upcycling. With my 25+ year background in textile waste, upcycling systems, and reuse education, my goal is to build a dedicated hub for knowledge developed largely outside the traditional fashion industry—regional methods and models that support local, sustainable production.

From 2002 to 2019, I collaborated with Canadian hosiery mills, pioneering creative remanufacturing techniques that fused craft with obsolete machinery to reimagine local production. What began as student research into waste hosiery became an industrial upcycling method, and later a blueprint for my PhD: an upcycling systems approach for creative textile reuse using UK wool and sock waste. That work generated two frameworks—M.E.N.D and Up‑Cycology—which I am now expanding on through my UK‑based studio and research practice.

Through my research and practice I view upcycling as a living system and research method that we are only just scratching the surface upon. As textile waste continues to be an increasingly dominant resource, consider this space as my way laying down and mapping out the upcycling landscape.

What I haven’t had is a living, breathing space to think aloud with others—to share the stories, methods, and questions that don’t quite fit in a grant application, academic paper, or Instagram caption. I’m launching this newsletter now because I’m ready to make my research and studio practice more porous, and to invite a community into the ongoing experiment of Waste(D): how we name, handle, and reimagine what we throw away.

2. What kind of community are you looking to build here

This is more than a newsletter; it’s a working studio and research lab in written form.

Here, I want to:

• Share Waste(D): essays and reflections on waste, reuse, and circularity that start with materials and situations and open into questions of value, labour, care, and time. It will be a space where I will highlight two decades of working with hosiery sharing insights on upcycling from the an artisanal and industrial perspective.

• Tell Sock Stories: narrative snapshots into my experience in upcycling UK sock waste—field notes, creative process, textile experimentation, insights, questions, experiences, etc.

• Open up my Upcycling Systems Thinking work: frameworks like M.E.N.D and Up‑Cycology

• Share case studies and emerging practices from independent designers, artists, creative practitioners, researchers and micro‑businesses who are quietly building the future of upcycling.

The community I’m inviting in includes designers, artists, educators, researchers, and re‑makers who are already working with waste—or feel called to—but want language, support, frameworks and structure for what they are doing. It’s also for organisations, schools, and local authorities curious about how upcycling can become a serious, situated response to textile waste rather than a side project.

I see this as one step toward a broader, global systems approach to upcycling that I refer to as an Upcycling Fibershed: accessible patterns, frameworks, and resources that help people tackle waste locally while contributing to a shared knowledge commons.

3. Your Experience

I want this to be clear, usable, and inspiring - not overwhelming. With upcycling being a living system the experience of what is offered on here with shift and evolve over time. Through feedback from you and ongoing research, my goal is to add and adapt these initial offerings. To start, here’s what you can expect.

For free subscribers

You’ll receive 2–3 posts per month, including:

• Waste(D) – short essays/meditations on waste, reuse, and circularity, rooted in real materials, stories, and histories.

• Sock Stories – studio letters and micro‑narratives from my practice as a textile waste designer, especially in hosiery and sock waste.

These posts are designed to be shared—with students, collaborators, organisations, and anyone who needs more nuanced ways of thinking about waste.

For paid subscribers

Paid subscriptions will support the long‑term work of this platform and unlock deeper, more applied material:

• In‑depth Waste(D) essays & frameworks

  • Extended writings that unpack specific reuse strategies and systems, historical reuse practices and contemporary models for local reuse.

  • Breakdowns of frameworks like M.E.N.D and Up‑Cycology, and how they can be adapted to different practices and regions.

• Field Guides, Tools, Resources

• Downloadable PDFs and resources aimed at elevating skills and strategies that support SDGs 8, 9 and 12 through reuse and upcycling.

• Priority invitations (and discounts) for future workshops, courses, and consulting offers related to textile waste, reuse strategy, and creative practice.

• Case studies & interviews

• Profiles of independent upcycling practices, micro‑factories, and local textile regeneration initiatives, in the UK and beyond.

4. Why subscribe now

If you join at the beginning, you’re helping shape the foundations of this space: what questions we prioritise, what case studies we surface, and what resources get built first. You’ll see the earliest threads of Waste(D), Sock Stories, and the broader upcycling systems work that will feed into future education, tools, and (I hope) a dedicated Centre for Upcycling Innovation.

If you’ve followed Sans Soucie or my work elsewhere, this is where you’ll find the connective tissue: not just finished textiles or frameworks, but the decisions, experiments, failures, and questions behind them.

If you’re new to this subject area, you’re very welcome: think of this as an invitation to stand on the periphery with me and ask what else might be possible.

Image: Sock and Yarn Waste - Waste Interview Process, Katherine Soucie, 2025

5. Thank You - Waste is Not an Ending, It’s a Relationship

Thank you for reading, and for making room in your inbox—and your own waste streams—for a different kind of story. Part of my mission is to help transform our relationship to waste: to share how we can SEE and DO differently and how waste is not an ending but an invitation to adapt creatively, responsibly and collaboratively.

If this resonates, the simplest way to support the work is to subscribe (and if you know someone that this would be a valuable resource for, feel free to forward this to them).

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