Turn Up The Style, Turn Down the Heat

Last night I attended Global Cool’s ‘turn up the style, turn down the heat’ event in Leeds. To give you a little background on Global Cool, they’re a green lifestyle organisation that inspires people to think differently and live differently in a fun way of course. The turn up the style turn down the heat campaign is something they’re running to encourage people to think about the energy they use and be more green by customising jumpers using style to keep you warm rather than blasting the heating. This was right up my street, I’m cheap when it comes to heating my flat. I’m always telling my girlfriend to put on another jumper so this was the perfect event to take her along.

The event was held at Remade in Leeds, which is a really cool place that people can go to and attend workshops to help them learn to sew and customise clothing.

So me and my girlfriend rocked up at the event and were welcomed with the offer of a cup of tea and a cupcake. The the actual studio was quiet cosy and had a vintage vibe to it which was really warm and friendly.

We then had a look around, conversed with some of the Global Cool staff and found a seat at the work bench. The idea was to buy a vintage jumper for £5 that went to charity which we would later customise. Now my sewing skills are pretty much non-existent so we decided that we’d get one jumper and work on it together. We went for a thick blue/green jumper because it was all wool and also because my girlfriend possibly could have worn it as a dress.

I also checked out some of the other pieces that had already been customised by the Global Cool stylists. All of them were real cool and gave us some decent ideas on how we’d customise our own jumpers.

We wanted to keep ours pretty simple aside from that, the last time I actually sewed was in high school. Even then my only memories of textiles were jamming the sewing machine. So we took a leaf out of one of the Global Cool stylist’s book and came out with a design with lots of pearls randomly placed on the front of the jumper.

We had to pin the locations we wanted the pearls to be. Then came the scary bit, sewing. My girlfriend showed me how to fix on the pearls and after spending about 10 minutes just trying to thread my needle I managed to sew on my first pearl. It was quite a therapeutic process and it was really good to see some of the other cool designs the other attendees had come up with.

After we had finished I was impressed with the results considering my sewing skills. We were asked to do a quick interview for Global Cool explaining what we had created and promising that it was going to be worn. Overall it was a really fun evening, I did something completely new, met some new people and ended up with a really cool jumper.

Global Cool have given me a few videos from X Factor Stylist Grace Woodward which you can check out below.

Let me know what you think of the jumper and pictures by commenting below.

Feeling this post? Then why not subscribe? You can subscribe by RSS here or subscribe by email by filling in your email address in the subscription box in the sidebar. You can also catch me on Bloglovin here.