ENTREPRENEURIAL young designers have embarked upon a charity challenge to transform castaway clothing into kitchen couture.

Cleveland College of Art & Design fashion and textile students are working in partnership with Teesside Hospice to upcycle unwanted clothes into bespoke household items to raise much-needed funds.

The Middlesbrough-based charity, which costs £2.2m each year to run, will provide the students with bags of denim jeans, unsellable in their charity shops, to be transformed into peg bags and designer aprons.

Retail area manager for Teesside Hospice Tracey O’Donnell explained: “Sometimes we get items of clothing donated that we can not sell in our charity shops.

“It may be that there is a button missing or the item has been damaged so if it then fails to sell in one of our £1 outlets it would normally end up going to the rag man.

“The charity makes £100,000 a year from such items but recently we have been looking at other ways in which we could use the unwanted material to see if we could get more money for the hospice by upcycling it.”

The 50 first and second year students will be divided into teams and will each create peg bags and aprons from the jeans which the charity will deliver to the college each week.

The items will then be collected and distributed to the 14 Teesside Hospice shops, across the region, before being labelled with individual tags with the student maker’s name and put up for sale.