The show:

Finally I will post about the show.
We didn't finish everything; actually, we finished barely half of the outfits we began...but we pulled together a few good pieces that followed the same idea.

So you can get a feel for the scene i was working with, check this out:
coca-cola hair station


here are our things!



Annalisa is very talented at making hand-felted wool hats. All the models wanted to wear them :)


Tess, Alejandra, Hailee, Aiko, Marikh, and Rachael.

Thank you for a great show and 10-day sewing adventure!

Tess and Annalisa: sewing friends!

denim seams

When recycling jeans into something new, usually just the main part of the pant leg is used. This leaves behind the gnarled, fat, needle-breaking and otherwise unsewable seams. Annalisa had the great idea of trying to make something entirely out of these seams.

We requested on freecycle for any ripped or worn out jeans and got a pretty good response.
Here is Annalisa cutting the seams out and saving the rest for later projects.


They look appealing with the yellow stitching and faded parts, huh?

Annalisa used these denim seams to follow the curves of a siver princess-seam dress. Very pretty. Unfortunately i don't have a picture of it right now.

I used the short pieces to create a wide belt. I like how the colors and textures made a new fabric.


We are going to develope this further...more to come :)

doily skirt

About two years ago I began collecting antique doilies to piece together into a beautiful skirt. It was such a time consuming process to get the right doily of the right size, shape, and weight in the right spot, and to get it all into a three dimensional form, delicate but sturdy enough to wear...that two years later, it was barely half complete. Annalisa and I decided this doily skirt was the perfect combination of recycled multiples plus good design to finally finish it and include it in the show.
Also, this skirt is nearly $250 in doilies (oops!)


Zina Bennion helped pin and sew lots of doilies together (thank you Zina!!)


We planned to have a pale blue dress under this skirt, but ran out of time. After looking at this picture, I decided it looked alright over grey pants. Good enough.

Tree skirt

Here is the idea:



Here are the materials:
salvaged linen scraps from former skirts, garage sales, thrift stores, and my grandma's collection.




I made a six-panel skirt using the different colors, weights, and textures of the linen.




I carefully drew branches on the skirt using pencil. This was the most time-consuming step of the entire process. After, i used Annalisa's batik wax (she is an amazing batik artist and also taught batik in Africa for several years!) to fill in all spaces i did not want to be dyed.

This also took some time, but it created a beautiful, translucent image.

After the dye bath, the branches were more red than expected, so the skirt was dyed again with a blue-brown dye. This turned out great and made the entire design more complex. The stiff, waxed sections of the skirt cracked when crumpled into the dye bucket, which made more intricate branching than i could have drawn.

Here is Rachael at a fitting. I love how the skirt turned out.

"The tree skirt"

show information

Hello! Annalisa and I have been sewing away. I have more updates and photos to post...but no time right now.

However, I do want to put up the link to the leonardo gallery blog, which has all the information for the show.

It is at 6 pm Friday February 29 (Leap Day) at the South Town Mall in Sandy.

See you there!

wow, last night Annalisa and I went to meet our models.
They are beautiful - and young (I forgot i was 15, too when I wanted to be a model!)

Here is Aiko:


Alejandra (she is definitely wearing the doily skirt and a cute felted hat)

Rachael:

Hailee:

Marikh will wear something green and flowing, don't you think?

Here is something:

And then we at Lebanese food at Mazza's :)

three or four

Annalisa and I have narrowed our big ideas down to three or four.
doily skirt and some kind of top.
denim bones dress.
recycled knitwear with nesting pocket.
and linen skirts with batiked branches (see earlier post for picture)

this is the nesting pocket thing. It is made by layering necklines from t-shirts.

More later!

ideas

this is what we have so far:



this is what i want everything to look like:

I'm also thinking about:

hand felting wool onto silk for a shirt.

finishing my pieced antique doily skirt idea.

making a skirt covered in pintucks.

using the necklines from t-shirts to make a nest-pocket.

Annalisa had the good idea to use seams from old jeans. I think it would be cool as a sculpted "bustier." Every show needs a bustier, right? wrong! but I don't know what else i want to be sculpted...

recycled design

Hello, my friend Annalisa and I have entered as a team in a recycled clothing design competition! Yes, can you believe? It is true true. There is a fashion show next friday, on Leap Day, to show everyone's creations. We started last night at 11pm, and have a lot of good ideas already. I'm going to update this blog daily with our progress, check back.

Here you can see us drafting, cracking walnuts, and drinking homemade kefir!

my dream world

I'm serious about the websites i posted a few posts ago. They are so cool.

There is a great video here at http://samorost2.net/plantage/ and two smart games called samorost1 and samorost2. They are smart because they creatively use plants, animals, and fungi :) in the design. I love it!

I play them all the time. And I haven't even beat samorost2. yet.