Community Clothing has partnered with sustainable luxury British stationery brand Mark+Fold, and Cumbria-based hand paper maker The Paper Foundation, to create a range of notebooks, the covers of which are made entirely from off cuts from the production of Community Clothing’s sustainable denim collection.
Community Clothing was founded in 2016 by Patrick Grant, British designer and Great British Sewing Bee judge, to support British craftsmanship and create skilled jobs in the UK. The company is based in Blackburn, Lancashire, and produces a line of clothing staples using ethically sourced materials in a co-operative of British mills and factories.
In October 2024 the Mark+Fold for Community Clothing stationery range was launched, which uses a special custom-made paper, produced by Paper Foundation, using denim offcuts from the Community Clothing jeans factory in Lancashire.
Linen ‘rag’ was traditionally used in paper-making, as the garment industry sent its waste to paper mills to be turned into paper. The Levi’s factory in the US famously supplied a lot of raw material to Crane’s, whose cotton paper is still in production today. But this practice has fallen out of fashion.
Community Clothing’s jeans manufacturer Cookson & Clegg in Blackburn now collects denim offcuts in the cutting room. This is sent just a few hundred miles up the road to Burneside in Cumbria where the hand-made paper atelier Paper Foundation transforms it into a beautiful tactile paper.
Patrick Grant, founder of Community Clothing said: “This is fantastic way of both preserving incredible local skills as well as making a beautiful super quality product from material that would otherwise have gone to landfill. It has been a pleasure to work with both Mark & Fold and The Paper Foundation, two amazing independent British producers.”
