Our story

Welcome to the wonderful world of Wasteless Wonders. We are a new sustainable home textiles brand, designing and producing handmade goods for your living spaces exclusively from waste materials.
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Transparency goes hand in hand with ethical and sustainable production. This page is all about the behind the scenes things, like our values, production process and the people behind this project.

Amount of waste recycled to date:

15,92 kg

Guiding principles

Round icon with orange background and white line drawing of 0%. One of the % circles is a ball of yarn

Eliminate Waste

We are proud to be not only zero waste, but effectively negative waste.

We take our materials from waste streams and at the same time, we don't contribute any new waste. We use up all our scraps and gladly take in those of others.
Circular icon with blush pink background and black line illustration depicting two hands and a heart

Elevate Handmade

Handmade is the only way to truly upcycle diverse waste materials.

Our products celebrate the slow and considered art of making things by hand. Stitch by stitch, row by row and seam by seam, waste material is transformed into new and wasteless wonders.
Circular icon with blue background and white line drawing of a leaf, circle and quarter circle shape

Extend Lifetimes

Our timeless designs and high quality production extend the lifetime of waste materials beyond the usual.

Plus, we produce in safe and ethical working conditions, pricing our products to pay fair wages. We extend sustainability to the people we work with and our own business.

Sourcing materials

Image of colorful yarn scraps

Finding waste materials

Our favorite material sources are local secondhand stores and recycling centers. These are our main sources for post-consumer waste material, which can include anything from old sweaters and discarded curtains to unused craft materials.

For larger collections we rely on some pre-consumer waste, like scraps and cut-offs that are generated in garment manufacturing. Another one of our sources are deadstock fabrics, which are leftover rolls of fabric, that don't make it into the final production run.

Are you a business looking to use your scraps, waste and cut-offs in a better way?

We are happy to collaborate with companies of any size and in a way that suits both our practices best. We take material donations, produce custom product collections or develop limited editions to add to your existing lines. Read more or drop us a message describing your waste materials and ideas for a potential collaboration and we will take it from there.
Learn more

The Making process

Cleaning, sorting, selecting

All the waste materials going into our production go through a three step process before they are used.
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Step 1: Cleaning the sometimes sensitive material by hand with natural soaps.
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Step 2: Untangling and rewinding yarn, as well as sorting all materials by color, material and quality.
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Step 3: Selecting a suitable combination of materials and technique for each new product.
Image of 6 different color balls of yarn on a white brackground. A hand is holding one of them

Crafting techniques

Hand holding weaving shuttle

Weaving

Weaving is a versatile technique, that can be used to turn even the worst yarns into new beautiful fabric. We use weaving to make rugs, pillow cases and wall tapestries.
Hand holding punch needle

Punch needle

Punch needle is a new crafting technique, a kind of combination of embroidery and rug hooking. We use this technique for wall art and pillow cases.
Hand holding large sewing needle

Sewing

Sewing plays some big or small part in most of our products. We use sewing not only to turn woven and punch needle fabrics into final products, but also to make quilts, pillows and more from scratch.
Hand holding crocheting hook

Crocheting

The perfect technique to transform yarn into three dimensional objects. Crocheting makes nice and sturdy shapes and we use it to make some of our baskets and planters.

Making takes time

You may be shocked at the level of our pricing. That's why we include a small section in our product description detailing the exact amount of time it took to make an item, the number of repetitive actions taken and the amount of waste recycled. This way you can have a better idea where our price comes from and the impact you are making by purchasing one of our products.

Below you will find a quick overview of all the further steps necessary to create a product after preparing the waste materials.
Image of a simple frame weaving loom with a weaving shuttle
1 Which ever technique used, most products require some set-up before the bulk of crafting, like setting up the loom or cutting pattern pieces to size.
Close up of hands working on the weaving loom. Some leaves of a plant in the foreground
2 The crafting process istself is quite often characterized by many hours of repeating work, be it making thousands of stitches or moving the shuttle back and fourth hundreds of times.
Image of a hand with scissors cutting the fringe of a woven piece of fabric
3 Afterwards there is some clean-up and finishing involved, for example weaving in loose ends or sewing woven fabrics into their final shape. We save all the scraps created in this process and use it as pillow stuffing.
Image of a hand packing a pillow case into a cardboard envelope
4 Lastly, if it is a new product, the items are photographed, categorized, described and published here on this website. If it is a made to order item, the product is carefully packaged in reusable or recyclable materials and shipped to our customers.

We take your Wasteless Wonders products back

More than anything, we believe in a circular economy. If we want to collectively reduce the amount of waste produced in our current economic system, this is the only way forward.

That's why we will always accept your Wasteless Wonders products back, so that we can recycle them in-house and use the materials once more for new products. If items are in a bad condition, they can always become fluffy pillow stuffing as a last resort.

As a little thank you for your efforts, for every returned item, you'll receive a 10%-off cupon for your next order to make up for some of the shipping costs.
Contact us
Illustration of circular product life cycle

Who is behind wasteless wonders?

Portrait of Valentina Lachner, working on some weaving

Hi! I'm Valentina

Even though I always talk about "we", at the moment this wonderous project is just a one-person endeavour.

I am a designer by profession with an MA in interior and product design. I'm a multi-disciplinary kind of creative and like to apply my design skills across all kinds of different fields.

My biggest passion is designing for sustainability and designing with waste materials, especially textiles. I love making things by hand and believe it is the most poweful recycling tool.

Greetings from Helsinki

I'm originally from Germany, but live and work out of my Helsinki home studio. All products are designed, prototyped and manufactured there.

For me, the process of making things by hand is a true luxury. And making a living, making things by hand is a true exception.

I hope to build a small network here, that supports other passionate designers, artisans and crafters to create sustainable products and make small scale handmade production a sustainable source of income.
Image of a corner of a room with a large weaving loom and an assortment of textile home goods
Wasteless Wonders - handcrafted home textiles - circular stamp with hand and leaf illustration