Turning boats into bags, refugee stitches together life in Greece

Bent over a sewing machine, Fariba Amini stitches her latest design using the unlikeliest of fabrics: a sheet from a discarded rubber dinghy, like the one that brought her and thousands more refugees to Greece.
The Afghan fled to Greece in 2016 with no documents and few prospects. Now she makes and sells bags and jewelry out of the starkest symbol of Europe's refugee crisis: the boats and life-jackets once strewn across Greece's shores.
"The bags remind me of how I got here and the bracelets remind of me the days when I was at the camp, those bad times," Amini, 31, said over the rattle of her machine, a measuring tape draped around her neck.
"When I started working on my sewing, they were a balm to my soul. They brought me peace."
The basement of the bare-bones studio in downtown Athens she shares with other asylum-seeker designers is stacked with black and grey...