Textbook
Carolina G.
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For my piece of art, I designed a dress made out of retired textbooks from my AP Environmental Science class. At the start of the school year, textbooks filled the back of my Environmental Science class, waiting to be sent to the landfill - in participating in a class about pollution and climate change, the irony was not lost on me. After learning about the principles of sustainability, one of which was reusing and recycling resources, I decided to take a few of the textbooks home to repurpose into a fashion design.
Comprised of two pieces, my dress can be split into a bodice and a skirt. I made the skirt by cutting four quarter circles out of butcher paper and then attaching the pages of a textbook using spray adhesive, leaving any excess paper on the edges. I pasted the pages from bottom to top, left to right, to maintain a consistent, overlapping pattern across the skirt. I paid careful attention to the ordering of the pages so that all the different chapters are represented in order when circling around the skirt with the beginning of the chapters at the top and the endings at the bottom. After the adhesive dried, I hand-pleated each quarter circle. To connect the quarter circles together, I placed the raw edges over the seams so the overlapping pattern of the pages could continue uninterrupted. I then taped the seams of the butcher paper on the inside and spray adhered the edges of the textbook pages on the outside.
Contrasting the composition of the skirt, I machine sewed the bodice together instead of using glue. The bodice itself is made of an outer shell (made of textbook pages) and an inner lining (using butcher paper). I sewed both pieces together like normal except I used tape to lay the seams flat instead of ironing them. The cups were definitely the hardest part to tackle as it proved nearly impossible to sew the curves without wrinkling the paper, though I learned to move slowly while working with them. Once I completed both the shell and the lining, I sewed their outer seams together and then topstitched over all the other exposed seams.
After completing the dress, I placed the bodice and skirt on a mannequin to showcase its design. For a finishing touch, I tied a ribbon around the mannequin's waist. After some hard work, the textbook ended up a dress on a mannequin instead book in a landfill.
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The ability to turn "nothing" into something is the essence of creativity. In the mind, colors, patterns, and shapes mix to create ideas. In reality, these ideas enter the world through art and push the boundary of what is possible.
