About Holly View Creative
About ME!
Hi and welcome to Holly View Creative. My name is Tracy and I have called the North Shore of Auckland home since 2009. I have a Kiwi husband that I met at work in England, and little did I know at the time we would be living in New Zealand with two children all these year later! As well as my interests in sewing, and teaching sewing I am also a play coach for Junky Monkeys. Junky Monkeys provides loose parts play to schools and encourages learning through play. I love being creative, and also helping younger people be creative. Whether that's behind a sewing machine or surrounded with junk loose parts playing. The creative process is by nature playful. We have to try things, play with how things work, problem solves, try again. Being creative is a process we can learn so much from.
Why Holly View?
My grandparents lived in a house called Holly View in the south of England. My dad was born in 1950 and this was the house he grew up in, and it seemed an idyllic time when kids roamed free with open ended play; a time before our throwaway culture and era of plastic. When I think about what I like to sewing and my ethos of reusing and repurposing it reminds me that there are plenty of things we can learn from looking back to the way some things were done in the past. Holly View seems the perfect name for my business. Especially as the first thing I made to sell was a peg bag. An old-school household staple that I wanted to bring back to life. I even have my grandmother old peg bag still. It's nothing fancy or even home made, but it speaks of an era where drying your clothes outside to dry was the norm.
When did you start sewing?
My sewing journey started in school when I did GCSE and then 'A' level Textiles but I didn't really pick it up again until I moved to New Zealand and had my kids. In 2017 when both kids were in school my sister shared this cool initiative she had recently come across called Boomerang Bags that had started up in Australia and there were groups popping up all over the world. We got excited about making fabric bags and giving them away to encourage people to say no to a plastic bag. We started a group where we lived and held community sew bees. We quickly up-skilled ourselves in french seams and box corners and away we went!. I even screen printed the boomerang bag logo at home.
Why do you use second hand fabric?
From my time volunteering to make Boomerang Bags I have seen first hand just how much unwanted fabric is out there. And if it doesn't find a purpose, it is thrown away and that's a huge waste. So my ethos is to repurpose second hand fabric make it into an item that can be used again and again.
So, what's the difference between recycling and up-cycling?
Recycling is taking an item, like glass or paper and making it into the same product again. Up-cycling is taking an object and making it into a product with higher value or purpose. For example, I might find a set of curtains in a second hand shop, but they have a few holes or are faded, so they are at the end of their life as curtains. I take them, cut around the holes and give the curtains a new life.
Where do you get your fabric from?
I get my fabric from a variety of places. second hand shops, Trade Me, Marketplace, my local resource centre and the local zero waste shop. I spend a fair amount of time keeping an eye out for suitable fabric.
I also sometimes get donations from friends, as the word is out now that I can't say no to fabric!