In november 2021, Daniel K. Schneider organized in collaboration with FacLab UniGE an event on upcycling clothes with an emoji.
We created and stitched about 20 designs for 16 participants. Only 4 participants asked to upcycle, but all expressed a future interest in saving their textiles through embroidery.
Participants were pleased with the results and most also expressed a desire to learn more. Selection, scanning, testing, redesigning, and final embroidery take about an hour if the emoji is simple. The open source fonts twemoji and noto are particularly suitable. We now have a collection of nearly designs and have shared them with a Creative Commons BY-SA license, i.e. people can download a design and reused it for commercial purposes, under the condition replicate the license. More information is available in the Emoji Embroidery Project Page. The list of currently available embroidery designs is available here.