I haven’t written much about what’s been going on in my life besides the planning of this trip. One thing in particular has taken a lot of time away from my preparations—fashion design. I started taking classes at a local college a few years ago while working full time. My main goal was to learn how to draft patterns for myself and my Halloween costumes. Since I was home in-between phase 1 and 2, I decided to make good use of my time and take the more advanced level of patternmaking and construction classes. I would have loved to continue on this semester to tailoring or the senior-level patternmaking classes but they weren’t offered. Instead, I took textile design and wearable art classes.
The classes were very time consuming, which was partly my fault. For my final project I decided to make a dress out of rawhide. I was shopping at the local leather warehouse and found a bin of scrap rawhide pieces. I bought about 12 lbs. of scraps and dyed each piece with homemade dyes—blueberry, red cabbage, onion, beets, coffee etc. For a long time my refridgerator was full of tubs of dye.
After months with a utility knife, awl and a 20 ft. roll of artifical sinew I had a full length rawhide dress. It’s incredibly uncomfortable, but it’s ‘wearable art’ so that’s okay. The school recently had a fashion show for the students and my dress was worn by a fellow design student whom it fit perfectly. She didn’t complain once about the scratchy material or when she almost fell over trying to get into it. The dress was also featured in today’s Daily Herald ‘Neighborhood’ section.
Now that classes have wrapped up I will no longer be distracted by fashion or textiles and can dedicate all of my time to final trip preparations.
2 responses to “Finishing Up Fashion”
Looks cool! No wonder you were working on it forever.
OK, what’s the final countdown til your trip?
Thanks! My hands haven’t recovered yet from the dyeing, cutting and hole punching.
June 8th is the day! There’s a countdown clock on the top right of my sidebar –>