With Anemone VT, Ashley Saville spins quilts into slow fashion
Ashely Saville, a Winooski resident, buys old quilts and repurposes them into coats, mittens, hats and any other article of clothing you can think of
Think of quilts, and you might conjure images of moth-eaten relics stuffed in an attic, fit with a dank smell, creepy old dolls and rickety, creaking floors. Ashley Saville, and her business Anemone VT, is forcing you to think again.
Saville, a Winooski resident, buys old quilts and repurposes them into coats, mittens, hats and any other article of clothing you can think of. The results are original creations made completely by Saville and her assistant from start to finish. It’s a lot of work, but rewarding.
“I really love the process of laying out (the quilts),” Saville said. “I spend probably the most time laying it out. Sometimes I’ll spend three hours before I cut into something or more.”
Saville’s scrupulousness matches how highly she values her work. That means her prices are relatively high, she admits, but her choices are grounded in making a livable wage and what she feels is fair for the work involved.
“Part of that goes into that lifting the veil on how things are made and having people understand how much work goes in and how much the real cost of things are,” she said.
And people do seem to understand, or at least maybe they want to. Saville has amassed some 60,000 followers on Instagram.
Leaning into this work has been an investment for Saville and her family. After growing up in Vermont, she moved to Portland, Maine, around 2011 and later spent about five years in Seattle to manage a beer company. Despite the move, she quit early into the job, feeling worn down by 80-hour work weeks and a lack of support around her.
“It was horrible. I was doing all these beer fests by myself,” she said.
She decided to take up nonprofit work, and soon after a job opened up with Lagunitas Brewing Company, merging the type of work she loved with the beer industry she hoped to cultivate. Still, she knew she wanted to come back to the East Coast at some point.
“I’ve always felt the pull to move back to Vermont,” Saville said. “When I moved to Portland, basically that day that I moved, I was like, ‘I already miss Burlington.’”
When she started Anemone VT around 2020 after returning to Vermont, she wanted to keep that sense of community close to her business. Aside from supporting her family, she hopes her work can be an impetus for people to make a difference.
“I like that hyper-local aspect of eating local, and (in the beer industry) going to a bar where there’s local beer on draft, and shopping small supporting small businesses and independent makers, and really knowing that people’s dollars make a difference to individual people instead of Amazon or Target or whatever.”
Saville has long nurtured an appreciation for old things, spurred by visiting antique stores and auctions with her father as a kid. The value of using what you already have is not lost on her.
“The fashion industry in particular is very problematic, and there’s so much textile waste in our country and throughout the world,” she said. “So just finding new ways to use what you have instead of having them end up in a landfill (is very important).”
When Saville was a kid, her family owned a bed and breakfast, and she was used to cutting old clothes and sheets to refashion them into curtains and the like.
“What I love about them is so many quilts are made from clothes that are worn out. So then folks would cut them up and use them to make the quilts to keep their families warm,” she said. “And now I'm using them in a new way to again come full circle and make them back into clothing again and working around damaged areas and turning them into new things, which I love.”
Even as her business has grown into a full-time job, she plans to keep it small, with the goal of providing for her family, producing quality goods and not sacrificing control or creativity.
“My launching point for everything I’m making is really just thinking about what I need in my life and just going from there. I never want to be influenced by anyone else and just kind of want to focus on stuff that makes me happy and things that I have a use for in my life,” she said.
Even as things ramp up for her business, Saville maintains a strict process in which she produces one batch at a time, focusing on just one style. She said it allows her to be more efficient and spend more time outside work.
“I love being outside, I love traveling when we can,” she said. “I’m a big reader. I’m a big beer person, now and always.”