The UP Creative Community is a collaborative of local artists who offer sustainable textile waste management in Sutton Coldfield.

We seek to do things differently, empowering the rejection of fast fashion and excessive purchasing in the mainstream.

We collect unwanted and used fabric items and repurpose them adding magic and sending them to their forever homes.

Our UPSkill programmes promote skills sharing amongst the community, from teaching basic sewing skills, to pattern cutting, handstitch for repair and for cathartic art. We offer a safe space for creativity to bloom, upcycling garments into unique pieces. We offer the tools to make better choices, to take some one else’s discarded items and make them into something incredibly beautiful and useful.

From resources for charities to use in their programmes, to costumes for local Opera, encouraging body positivity by showing how to make clothing to fit individual bodies, collaborative projects across the schools in the region to intergenerational making, we are at the forefront of change. Rejecting the norm and showing that sustainable thought is no more than taking your time to consider your choices rather than do what is easiest. By slowing down our consumption we make better choices.

We offer a consultancy to commerce, education and the third sector in cultural change-  focussing on the current habitual consumption and highlighting how we can make tiny institutionally engrained decisions differently to save money and use the resources we already have in the community