up and a WAY designs

ABOUT ME:

Welcome to my page! My name is Jackie Way and I am the creator, designer, and the ‘WAY’ behind ‘up and a WAY designs’. I started ‘up and a WAY designs’ in 2016 to create something useful from used, leftover coffee bean sacks which were just too cool and beautiful to send to a landfill. When I’m not working as a medical lab technologist, I can be found upcycling coffee bean sacks into unique burlap baskets, wine totes, tote bags, and home decor in my home in Pittsburgh, PA. I love designing, creating, and refashioning these trashed sacks into a treasure that is not only new and beautiful but useful and sustainable too.

ABOUT MY PRODUCTS:

Everything I design and sew is a one-of-a-kind, sustainable original, handcrafted from authentic, used coffee bean sacks. I arrange the original graphics and printing as the central design on my baskets and tote bags and I use the leftover plain scraps of burlap to construct my wine totes, mini baskets, and home decor items. In addition to upcycling the burlap from the coffee bean sacks, many of the linings and accent fabrics I choose for my designs are fabrics recycled from past project leftovers or donated remnants. My coffee sacks come from local Pittsburgh area coffee roasters and many of my lining and accent fabrics come from my favorite shop, the Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse. Most recently, I “inherited” several bins of fabric left behind in a newly sold house by its former, deceased owner. It is my honor to put her fabric collection to good use in the designs I make for you!