Those barely worn holiday-themed sweaters tucked away in your closet just might have a new home in your home, thanks to Crispina Ffrench. As founder of the Massachusetts-based company Crispina Fuchsia, Inc., this artist and designer collects fabric scraps and once-loved wool sweaters, then transforms them into intricately designed rugs, blankets, and home accessories. Right from the start, with Ragamuffins-her signature line of colorful hand-sewn creatures made from thrift-store finds-Ffrench's 20-year-old concept has represented recycling at its best. Here, Ffrench chats with Blue Egg about sustainability and a business built on the treasures of trash.

Your company, Crispina Fuchsia, Inc., began with the Ragamuffin line, a collection of dolls made out of used wool sweaters. What was the inspiration behind these little guys?
I started making them in 1987, when I was a college student at the Massachusetts College of Art. At the time, I was really interested in biodegradability and recycling, and most people thought it was kind of nuts. There were no blue bins, and recycling wasn't even a word that people knew. So I first started making them out of handmade felt, which I didn't enjoy. We had this felt maker come, and we were instructed on how to make felt, and I made my first Ragamuffins. Then my dad said, "Oh, you know, you should make those out of sweaters, because you can get a lot of colors and patterns," and that idea really fit with my life mission of thinking about what we consume. So I started making the Ragamuffins out of recycled sweaters instead of felt. When I first started selling them, I didn't tell people they were recycled, because once they knew they were made out of old clothes, some people thought it was gross. They'd ask me if they were clean, which people still do. After I made Ragamuffins, I started making mittens, then blankets.

Did you start this company with sustainability in mind, or was it more of an experiment?
Well, sustainability is sort of an oxymoron. We don't live sustainable lifestyles at all as consumers. I was interested in trying to have a small footprint, to just live and work with the idea that we could balance our ecosystem while being part of it as human beings. It's still my mission.

Where do you typically find your sweaters? Do you get donations?
We actually don't take donations. It's more sustainable for people to give them to their local Goodwills rather than shipping them to us. If you put them in a box, tape it up, and put it on a UPS truck, it takes a lot of fossil fuel. Whereas if you just throw it in a Salvation Army bin, they have a bigger volume of resale. What we do is buy our material in 1,000-lb. bales from a network of used-clothing wholesalers. They're located all over the country, and we also buy some from Europe.

Oh, I'd imagined you combed the Goodwill outlets yourself.
We used to; that's how I started. But in the summertime, it's hard to find wool sweaters at Goodwill. You know, they just kind of show up with the seasons. So when I first started my business, I realized that and then stumbled across the first of my suppliers. When they ran out of the stuff that I could use, they told me about a friend who had a similar company somewhere else, and I discovered a weird underground network of people that have been doing what they do for generations. Most of them are family-run companies.

Do you have a favorite style or collection?
Well, I always like the newest stuff the best, but I like all of what we do. I guess the things we're known most for are the Signature Collection blankets, which are ones that are made out of wool sweaters edged in velvet. I think I like working with wool the best, but we work with cotton as well, because a lot of people are allergic to wool. As the business kind of grew, it became apparent that I had to diversify our fiber content. Now we have all-cotton collections and some that are cotton-wool mixtures, and we don't just use post-consumer clothing-we use post-manufacturing waste as well. We do a project with American Apparel. They manufacture all their products, and we use their waste.

How do you come up with your ideas? Are you constantly thinking of new patterns?
What really inspired me to start was the fact that there was this huge amount of clothing in our culture that was just getting thrown away, and it's beautiful fabric. For the most part, there's nothing really wrong with the fabric at all. Right now, we generate a fair amount of scrap in our process, so I'm totally jazzed to figure out products that use the scrap we generate. Actually, we just did a huge contract job with Timberland. They're doing all the holiday decorations in their stores, and we designed and produced those for them. They're all made out of scrap. We're doing all their holiday in-store decorations, and they're also going to be selling the decorations.

If your products are made of old sweaters, how do you determine your price?
We figure out how much it costs us to buy the sweaters per pound, and then we cut everything in certain shapes. Most of the squares we use are 7-inch squares. Most of the cost of our product is in labor by far. Eighty percent of our cost is labor, but we really try to pay a livable wage. One of the things that we're doing differently is that we pay people by the piece, so the more pieces somebody makes, the more money they make. It's a motivator, because if people know that if they work hard they'll get paid more, then they'll want to work hard and get paid more.

So how much time goes into making a blanket or a rug?
It really depends on the size and the cost of the product. The more expensive products take longer to make. With the Ragamuffins, for instance, we make them in components. One person makes all of the legs, one person makes all the heads, another person makes all the bodies, and then another person constructs them. It's not really assembly-line work, but if you make all legs, you're much faster than if you have to make four legs, and then a body, and then a head, and then put it together. It enables people to get their production smooth, and we switch it around so people aren't always making the same thing. It also depends on the person; because they do get paid by the piece, some people work faster than others. We have two rug weavers that are speed demons; they can make a 5'-by-7' rug in a day. I can't make a rug nearly as fast as they can.

How long would it take for the bigger rugs?
Well, the 5'-by-7' is sort of a standard size, and 7'-by-11' is two 5'-by-7's, so it would take two days, but that's just to weave it. We have a different person that cuts the material and a different person that washes and dries the material. When people think of making a rug, they think of weaving a rug. But there's a lot of prep time that goes into it. I would say you could make a rug in a day. Sometimes they make 2'-by-3' rugs; they can crank out seven or eight of those in a day, so it depends.

And with the Pot Holder rugs-did you envision those to look like pot holders, or did they just come out that way?
They're just giant pot holders-there's no technology involved. When we buy sweaters in volume, you get sweaters that aren't that great for blankets. So we had all these sweaters that had holes or stains or were not the right texture to make into blankets. I had to think of something to make them into, and rugs came to mind. I tried making rugs out of grocery-store shopping bags, but it didn't really pan out. The idea was cool, but they were really butt-ugly.

I saw on your website that you work out of an old church. What's that like?
We moved here last July, so we've been here just a little more than a year. We're in Pittsfield, MA, which was the headquarters of GE plastics in the '70s and '80s. They made all kinds of terrible things here, like nuclear warheads. GE pulled out of Pittsfield when it was discovered that they were dumping tons of PCBs in the river. When they pulled out, all the good jobs left Pittsfield, and consequently the economy of the city kind of collapsed. After 9/11, herds of people moved out of the city and into the Berkshires, and it really boosted the economy. But it also made it kind of unaffordable for some people to live there. Hence, we decided to jump on the bandwagon to help rehab the city of Pittsfield and bought this church and the rectory next door about a year and a half ago.

It was a Catholic church. There were ten Catholic churches in the city at one point, and there's not that many Catholics to go around, so they decided that they needed to downsize their expenses and have been selling off a couple of the churches here and there. We're developing kind of a business plan for the church, to make sure that what we do has an environmental spin on things. We're trying to figure out a way to make that into a really viable resource center for contractors and homeowners and people who are thinking about moving to the area.

So is the goal of the church to be completely green?
Yeah, and it is, actually. Pittsfield is very much the center of the Berkshires. It's where a lot of artists are. It's getting all this press about being a mecca for artists, so our idea is to continue and encourage that and to spread it out so it's also an environmental hub as well. There's a lot of people here that just need to come together as a group to have that happen as well, so we're hoping that we can facilitate that a little bit.

That sounds like a really good idea.
Right now, we're making the rectory into six condos with a green spin as well. We're doing all low-impact condos, six separate living units. We're doing all organic landscaping, and all low-impact environmental building materials and paint and everything and a lot of recycled stuff, too. And we're using pews from the church to do paneling. It should be really cool, and I'm hoping that we can attract like-minded inhabitants to our little project next door.

What magical power over the environment would you most like to have?
Well, being that we're a part of the environment, it would be so nice if everybody could just get along. I think part of getting along is understanding each other and the ecosystem that we all share. I guess I'd have to say that I'd like to wave my magic wand and say that people just need to be more aware of their impact on the environment.

What's one easy thing that you do for the environment that you wish everyone else would do?
I recycle in my house-you know, paper, cans, and bottles. And also I ride my bike everywhere, and I don't own a television. I try to buy all organic food. I have a couple of little kids, so I think that's important-eating healthy food and supporting the people who are really working hard to keep their environments healthy.

Do you ask your friends to do any of these things?
Organic food is expensive, so my friends they do what they can. But I do try to encourage people to recycle. At the studio we recycle, but not everyone really understands why, and I guess I do a lot of educating in that department. I try to live what I say.

If you could choose, whom would you want to be your carpool buddy and why?
It would have to be a big car. I really like young people. I like learning from the kids and staying on top of what they're thinking about. So I'd like to throw in a couple of unknown teenagers from places across the country. I think that'd be interesting to carpool with them. Al Gore would be cool; I'd like to chitchat with him a little. And you know whom else I really dig? Ben Cohen from Ben & Jerry's. They're really awesome. Ben Cohen's been super-helpful to me over the years; he's just a really good guy. So I would definitely carpool with them.

That's cool. I'll get in that car with you, 'cause I really love them, too.
OK, yeah, we'll have to get a big car. A big hybrid car.

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