Katherine Soucie

About the practice

My practice begins with waste that already exists: pre-consumer hosiery and sock waste diverted from manufacturing streams. Rather than treating this material as an end-of-life problem, I approach it as a resource with untapped material, cultural, and creative potential. Each stage of my work asks how discarded textiles can be remade into something functional, durable, and meaningful. At the centre of my practice is a signature industrial upcycling method developed over eighteen years through Sans Soucie Textile + Design. I combine zero-waste hand dyeing, printing, and surface design with zero-waste cutting and re-assembly construction. Decommissioned industrial finishing machinery from the hosiery industry is creatively reused to transform waste nylon hosiery into new yardage, garments, accessories, sculptural forms, and installations. Offcuts are retained and reworked, keeping material in circulation for as long as possible. This approach is both artisanal and scalable. I work intuitively with the qualities of each waste stream—its colour, weight, elasticity, damage, and history—while using industrial processes to develop repeatable methods for remanufacturing. The result is not a single standardised product, but a body of one-of-a-kind heirloom textiles and limited-edition work shaped by the material itself. Collaboration is essential to how I work. In Canada, I partnered with manufacturers including Doris Hosiery, Reliable Hosiery, Gildan Apparel Canada, and Hanes to access pre-consumer hosiery waste and develop diversion strategies. These partnerships allowed me to work directly with industrial material flows, understanding production systems from the inside while testing how waste could become a viable design resource. My work also connects craft, industry, and digital technology. I use obsolete and decommissioned machinery not simply for efficiency, but as part of a circular framework that values repair, adaptation, and reuse. Through this process, textile waste becomes a site for circular design, cultural identity, and creative expression. Since relocating to the UK in 2019, my practice has developed in relation to UK sock and hosiery waste streams. This shift informed my doctoral research and led to the formation of Sans Soucie Inc. in 2025. Today, I continue to build on the methods, archive, and learning of the Vancouver studio while developing new UK-based partnerships, material streams, and circular systems.