With fast fashion being on the raise, no one thinks about how fast we’re just going through trends and clothing. No one really realizes how bad for our world fast fashion is. According to statistics 85% of landfills are filled from unwanted clothing. One big way we as consumers, can help fit this problem is one buy less or recycle our clothing and objects around us. I was lucky to have a fashion program that would host a fashion show in the spring that was centered around making a garment from recycled clothing/articles.

My first Tee Time I participated in was 2015, where I made a dress out of unused muslin that was left in our design lab. The main inspiration for the piece were our flowers that bloom in the spring on campus. I wanted to have a reflective look with the colors, I was first thinking of putting glass on the dress, but decided that be on the recycle theme I would use old CDs instead. I broke up the CDs to emulate the look of broken class, I then added party streamers to give off more of a reflective look. I added gears from another project I had adding different pieces of yarn and string I found in our lab. I sprayed painted the whole dress in the end to represent the flowers.

In 2017, I did my second Tee Time my main inspiration was once again the flowers on campus. Using fabrics from my two collections, I made a crop from the leather I had. On the crop top I hand painted little flowers, I thought it would be interesting to make the crop top seem as if it was bra so I used the pinpoint tulle I had to make a see-through overshirt for it. I then hand dyed fabric flower petals matching the flowers I had painted. Sticking with the inspiration of flowers and hand painting for the details, I painted a vine with flower buds onto the pants. The pants being made from leftover bleached muslin from our lab and put the same fabric flower petals to represent the buds.