A new partnership with ECO fashion week Vancouver!!

This past week has been a great one for OSF. Not only have we solidified an amazing team to be the board of directors, received numerous donations from sets and individuals ready to part with fabric collections, but we have also teamed up with the talented and inspired crew at ECO fashion week Vancouver!!! Things at OSF are chugging along, we have submitted our first full order of yoga bags to be produced by Common Thread, and will be ready to sell and wholesale the bags during the Olympics at the Canamade market happening in Gastown.

Wow so much has happened for us, we are truly blessed and are all excited to see what is next!

In the meantime, we want to encourage you to purchase a ticket to

Eco Fashion Forward Fundraiser night on february 19th.

read more about this amazing event here.

Come out and show your support for the ECO fashion movement which is not just fashionable, but also saves our planet.. and what better cause than that?!

Grace Gallery Event a Huge Success!

Just before Christmas the Grace Gallery hosted a beautiful event and Our Social Fabric was the recipient of cash donations and a percentage of the art sales. The money raised is going to help us jump start the production of our yoga bags, secure a space that we can call our own, and help to keep everything moving. We are so thankful to Rachel Zottenberg and all the people at Grace Gallery for thinking of us, and we are pleased to announce that we will be recieving over $1400!!!!

Soon we will have photo’s up of the bags so you can order them directly online from us! below are a couple of photo’s from the evening.

Kim Cathers guest on Urban Rush, talks about Our Social Fabric.

Kim Cathers, who is an active member of our team here at Our Social Fabric visited the set of Urban Rush today in Vancouver to talk recycled products! You can check out the show (starting dec 18th) online here. To get in touch with us about donating fabric ,purchasing goods or more info please email us!! oursocialfabric@gmail.com. photo by : kris krug

this wednesday come and show your support of our social fabric and local artists!!

This holiday season the people at grace gallery wanted to celebrate with their  friends and family, here is your invite.
For all you’ve done for them they’d like to invite you to:

THE ART OF GIVING
When: December 16th @ grace-gallery
7pm – 11pm
Where: grace-gallery
1898 Main St. VancouverTHE ART OF GIVING is about support and celebration. Featuring some of Vancouver’s top artists who’ve graciously agreed to sell for a price point of $400 or less in our first ever Cash & Carry original artwork sale with all proceeds going to support

Our Social Fabric: A socially responsible non-profit organization in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, specializing in textile collection, recycling & re-manufacturing, while providing employment & social reintegration opportunities for DTES residents.

Fall in love with a piece… Take it home that night!Featuring Work by:
Raif Adelberg, Ronan Boyle , Bienvenido Cruz, Andy Dixon, Michael Doehle, Christopher Fadden, Angela Fama, Shallom Johnson, Kris Krug, Malcolm Levy, Bobby Mathieson, Chad Murray, Neal Nolan, Terri Potratz, Stacy Sakai, Philippe Sokazo

With Food Generously Sponsored by Nuba Lebanese Cuisine
Inspired by independent and modern era of Beirut in the 1940’s. Nuba has brought innovative Lebanese cuisine right into the palate of Vancouver. While taking time to create an undeniably exquisite experience to the taste-buds, Nuba manages to maintain the simplicity of their menu & commitment to value. While graciously providing the food for The Art of Giving , Nuba is also eagerly anticipating the opening of their South Main Street location at 146 E. 3rd Ave. Our new neighbours Yay!!!

With Drinks Generously Sponsored by Absolut Vodka & Jameson Irish Whisky
ABSOLUT® Vodka is the third-largest international spirits brand in the world & Jameson Whisky is the worlds number one whisky. ABSOLUT® is celebrating everything unique about Vancouver, reaching out to those cultural touchstones within Greater Vancouver whose passion, vision and body of work have helped to define Vancouver as a home for the arts.

Please RSVP to rsvptheartofgiving@gmail.com

AND PLEASE
We’re asking people to bring their old scarves with them to the event to donate to those in need.

More about Our Social Fabric
Textiles are one the most common household items and represent a staggering proportion of the solid waste stream: approximately 16kg per person, or a total of 33,600 tonnes in Metro Vancouver in 2006, to give you an idea. Despite the volume of this waste, few options exist to reuse or recycle salvageable textile items – and next to none for those items that can not be resold. As a result, these textiles end their still-functional lives in the landfill or waste-to-energy incinerator.
Our Social Fabric believes that this unnecessary waste can be not only be avoided, but channeled to create positive change in Vancouver’s most impoverished neighborhood. Aside from the obvious benefits of reducing the waste we are diverting to landfills and waste-to-energy facilities, textile recycling can have a direct impact on the socio-economic viability of the downtown east side. Jobs are needed now, and OSF goal is to recycle donated and salvaged textiles into new products, from clothing to utility products.
This unique venture not only benefits the environment but the economy and all citizens of our community. Learn more at oursocialfabric.org

Special Thank you to
Dani Vachon
Mark Gunthrek
Ryan Lanji

Good news for our social fabric!

Just recently we have found a space to store all of our amazing donations in! It has been donated to us on a temporary basis, and soon we hope to be making enough revenue that we can rent it ourselves. Two very exciting donations have been from Smallville and Stargate productions!!! We will follow up with some photos of the deliveries and also report on some awsome collaborations happening with local textile artists.

Looking For a New Home in the DTES.

With a number of exciting projects underway leading up to the winter season, Our Social Fabric is on the hunt for a large warehouse space to store our textiles and act as a workspace for project development and execution.

Because our mandate is to provide employment and social reintegration opportunities for residents of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side community through textile recycling, the ideal location for the Our Social Fabric warehouse would be situated within this region.

As we move ahead in our search, we ask that if you have any leads on a ~2,000 s.f. space that you send us an email and help us find a home for our organization.

There are many more developments to come, but our first step is finding an appropriate location to work from.

Stay tuned for more details, and send an email to oursocialfabric.vancouver[at]gmail[dot]com if you are aware of any suitable workspaces for us to move into!

First Donation

Our Social fabric would like to thank the costume department of the set of Alice. The production was set in July and August of 2009 in Vancouver. On August 14 the costume department delivered 12 banker boxes and some rolls of fabric to our temporary storage site. The fabric was in such good condition that it can be reused in its current state.

All About R.U.T.H Recyling Used Textiles Humanly

Social Fabric’s first project, Recycling Used Textiles Humanly (RUTH), seeks to provide employment to marginalized citizens and remanufacture materials that would otherwise go into the landfill. Operational activities will include:

* collecting textile garments

* sorting into reusable and non-reusable

* shredding all non-reusable items and weaving fibres into bolts of fabric

* designing, manufacturing, and marketing quality textile items for sale in Metro Vancouver

* providing the stimulus and opportunities for education on the social and environmental benefits of textile recycling and the potention for job creation RUTH is unique! To the best of our knowledge there exists no such initiative in North America.