Pavophobia and Trampoline Punk: A Senior Year Trashion/Refashion Show

Once upon a time, there was a four-year-old who was super into drawing pictures of pretty outfits she'd thought up. She also like to take her mom's fabric scraps and cut and tape them into fancy clothes for her Barbies. 

One day her mom, who still got the local newspaper because it hadn't yet been sold to a conglomerate whose sole goal was to bleed its assets, saw a call for entries for the town's second annual Trashion/Refashion Show. It invited people to design their own outfits from trash and repurposed materials, and if they were accepted they'd get to model them in a runway show benefiting the local sustainable living center. It seemed like a good project for a homeschooling preschooler and her crafty mom, so the mom asked her kid if she wanted to design an outfit and help sew it and be in a real fashion show.

The kid did.

This was her design:

This is what her mom sewed:

And this is the kid getting her photo taken right before she walked the runway:

That was fourteen years ago, y'all. I don't even know how this didn't go the way of gymnastics and aerial silks and Animal Jam and horseback riding and My Little Pony and Girl Scout summer camp. But every year, leaving the theatre at the end of the Trashion/Refashion Show, the kid would be talking about what she wanted to design the next year, and then every next year when the call for entries came out, there she'd be drawing her design for me, and after the age of nine helping me sew it, and after the age of eleven sewing the whole thing, and after the age of thirteen taking over writing out and submitting her entry, too.

So somehow the years have passed until now, along with her Spring ballet recital and our Girl Scout troop's Bridging/Graduation party, this show has become another last thing for her Senior year of high school.

It's a weird feeling to be a secondary character in someone else's good old days. 

As the kids are getting properly grown up now, I've realized that these kid years are my good old days, too. So because this is also MY last Trashion/Refashion Show, or at least the last one that I'll experience this way, I asked the kid if I could go back to our roots and design and sew an outfit for her to model. She said yes, and I immediately set about discovering for myself how inadvisable it is to sew a garment for a human to wear out of a broken trampoline. 

Like, that webbing is SHARP!

This is what it looks like when the kid and I are both working on our entries on the same weekend, because we both procrastinated until the very last minute.

I ended up cutting it with the kitchen shears because I was too afraid to let any of my proper scissors near it, and tbh now I probably need a new pair of kitchen shears. The plastic threads in the cut ends of the webbing cut ME the entire time I was working with it, and they poked through all the seams and cut the kid until I covered every single inside seam with duct tape.

And there was only a certain amount of sewing I could possibly do by machine--

--before I had to just get out the hand-sewing needle and embroidery floss and resign myself to hand-stitching all the fussy parts while cutting myself up even more thoroughly.

The dog looks perturbed in the below photo, but even with all that I was happy as a clam, making a big mess in the family room in parallel with the kid making her own big mess. These ARE the good old days!

Remember that skull quilt block from November? I didn't know at the time what I was going to do with it, but I did happen to sew it from a thrifted blouse and my old wedding dress--

--which made it a refashioned item, which means that I could applique it onto the back of the trampoline webbing dress jacket. And then I cut the bodice off the wedding dress, turned it backwards so the cool fake buttons went down the front, added some spaghetti straps, and that became the dress shirt for the garment:

The trampoline webbing pants were a nightmare to sew (and a nightmare to wear, ahem, if you happen to enjoy being able to bend at the hips and knees) and I kept them super simple, but I did cut the triangle rings out of the webbing and hook them together to make a chain to add a little detail to the otherwise plain black:

And here's my Trampoline Punk!

Trampoline Punk image via Bloomington Trashion

Here's the kid's own design, Pavophobia:

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

And then one last walk down the runway together for old times' sake:

Model/Designer Walk image via Bloomington Trashion

Some of the kid's friends always come to watch her show, and afterwards I always take them all out for ice cream. Because this was also the Eclipse Weekend, though, every place was paaaaacked even at 9:30 pm on a Sunday. It was bananas! But finally we found a spot where the line at least wasn't out the door, and although they were out of waffle cones they still had one last waffle bowl left, and then a giant group left and we were all able to wedge ourselves around a little table in the back corner behind a bunch of local college students whose friends had all come to town for the eclipse:

The kids mostly talked amongst themselves but because they're nice kids and they've all known me since they were seven, they kindly included me in their conversation, as well. A year from now I'm definitely going to have to find my own friends to eat rainbow sherbet with on a certain Sunday night in mid-April, but this one last year I just enjoyed the heck out of it, like you're supposed to do in the good old days.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Trashion/Refashion Show 2023: Quick Change

 

It was about 4:00 pm on the Sunday of this year's Trashion/Refashion Show. The teenager and I were happily ensconced in our spot on the landing of the upper lobby's balcony, the one that replaced our previous traditional spot in the back of the audience in the balcony and our previous previous traditional spot on the floor in front of the accessible seats halfway back on stage right. We were eating our traditional snacks of fruit gummies and sparkling water in cans, and had bonus snacks of full-sized Lara Bars(!!!) from the complimentary snack table backstage. We were sitting in companionable silence, each on our phones (I have found a blog that does a snarky episode-by-episode recap of Gilmore Girls and I will do nothing else productive in my life until I have read the entire run of recaps, including those for A Year in the Life!), listening to a couple arguing in the lobby below. Whenever one of them said something especially shocking, we'd make expressive eyes at each other. We were anticipating the 5:00 backstage pizza delivery, the 6:30 opening of the house, and, of course, the 7:00 top of the show.

A thought suddenly occurred to me, so I looked up from my phone and told the teenager, "You know, I think this is one of my favorite days of the year to spend with you."

She said, "Right? We should do this more often."

Alas that our town's Trashion/Refashion Show happens only once a year! I eagerly anticipate it every spring, and it IS one of my favorite days, and favorite nights, of the year. 

As much as I love watching this kid grow up, watching her grow away from needing her mom's help is a little bit of lonesome--once upon a time, I sewed the kid's entire garment based on a single markered drawing, helped her with her hair and makeup, taught her a runway walk, helped her practice it, chaperoned her every second backstage, and escorted her through the final Model/Designer walk. The first year she sewed her own garment all by herself, I essentially reattached the entire thing together using safety pins and duct tape between the dress rehearsal and showtime. Even last year, I spent the whole week leading up to the show figuring out how on earth to create those dream moth wings of hers, finally finishing them so the teenager could paint them the day before. 

This year... well, let's see. I held her several extra emotional support hair ties for her, and her ipod. I figured out how to keep the tops of her sleeves secure around her upper arms after they kept slipping down. And I took the photos and videos that she requested. 

My help was so unnecessary to my own designer/model that I volunteered to do emergency mending for anyone in the show who needed it--and THEN I had plenty to do!

As always, this kid's concept and execution amaze me. Her idea for this year was a garment consisting of skirt, bodice, sleeves, veil, and flowy overskirt, all separate pieces:

The flowy, modest overskirt is easy to detach--

--resulting in a look appropriate for a night out dancing:

It turned out beautifully, and she wore it just as beautifully on the runway!

Afterwards, the teenager was thrilled that some of her friends had come to see her--

--and I managed to sneak in a little love, too!

And just in case you'd deluded yourself into thinking that you'd be able to see her face if only she would ditch that veil...

Always and forever our favorite mask! I need to pick up pack of 100 before we leave for England.

Next year will be the last year that this kid designs and models as a grade school kid. If she's accepted next year, it will be her fourteenth time accepted into the show and her thirteenth walk down the runway (fucking Covid). I don't know if it will be her last time participating, but it WILL be her last time as the child phenom who's been designing and modeling her own original garments since the age of four--there are a LOT of college students in the show every year!

Contemplating all that, I had another thought, so this morning I asked the teenager, "Hey, can I design you a garment next year?"

TEENAGER: "Hmm, I've never modeled two garments in one show before."

ME: "Right? Could be fun!"

TEENAGER: "Sure, why not?"

Even though the teenager will also do her own entry, I kind of love the idea, for me, of finishing out the Trashion/Refashion Show where I started it--designing and sewing a garment, with lots of love, a little bit of skill, and maybe a couple of secret staples, for this awesome kid.

Trashion/Refashion Show 2022: Mothic

One of my favorite Syd retrospectives is her path through creating, constructing, and modeling her original designs in our town's Trashion/Refashion Show. She's gone from a four-year-old who used up most of a pink marker to draw what she wanted me to make her--

2011: Fairy Princess

2012: Rainbow Fairy

2013: Rose Dress

2014: Upside-Down Orange

2015: The Awesomes

--to a nine-year-old who took over some of the work of construction and embellishment--

2016: The Phoenix

2017: Supergirl of the Night

--to an eleven-year-old capable enough to be the sole artist at work, responsible for all the design, sewing, and styling of her garments:

2018: Medieval Maiden

2019: Gibbon Girl

2020 would have been the debut of her first work designing a garment for someone else, with three of her designs accepted into the show, and two friends excited to model with her.

Happily, the Trashion/Refashion Show came back in 2021, though in a new location and diminished capacity:

2021: That Girl from The Ring

So 2022 was when we got to enjoy our Trashion/Refashion Show back at capacity and back where it belonged in our town's 100-year-old theater. In 1922, people packed the seats to watch silent movies, but a few days ago, they were there to watch the designer of Mothic model her original creation on the runway.

Her garment originally started out quite different. Here are some of her application photos:

Syd later decided to change the undershirt to black, as well, but the bodice and skirt set stayed the same in the final garment. The biggest change, though, was the wings. Here are her original wings:

She could not figure out how to construct the look she was going for, so settled on highly embellishing wings that would remain closed and function like a cape:

Syd finally solved the construction issue by moving to the lightest fabric we could find--old cotton bedsheets--painting them with a combination of fabric dye and artist's acrylics, and creating a light structure from corrugated cardboard to give them the extension she wanted.

I think she achieved the look she was going for:

And here she is in motion:

It was a special day and a beautiful night, and I'm glad that we got to have it again.

Syd is still interested in extendable wing forms, particularly articulated ones that can be controlled by the wearer, so it looks like we've got our summer engineering project all figured out!

How to Refashion Pants into a Skirt

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World in 2017.

 There are several ways to refashion pants into a skirt, including this cute method for making a denim skirt out of a pair of old blue jeans. Even that method, though, can feel overwhelming to a newbie sewer, so here's an even easier method! 

 As you can see in the image above, all you need for this refashion are: 

  a pair of pants that fit well at the waist. They can be as ripped, stained, or ugly as they need to be in the legs, as long as they're well-fitting in the waist. This is a great way to refashion pants that are too short after your kid hits her latest growth spurt, or winter pants that you know will be too short next fall. It's also great for those carpenter/bootleg/skinny/whatever style of jeans you've got that used to be trendy but are now just laughable, the poor things. 

  an A-line skirt whose diameter at some point matches the hip measurement of your pants. The waist on this skirt doesn't matter at all, as long as at some point its flare has the same measurement as the hip measurement of your pants. That's because you're going to do this: 

1. Line up the pants and the skirt at their matching measurements. As you can see in the above image, I've drawn a chalk line exactly where I want to cut the pants--see how this allows me to keep the entire waist and pockets of the pants? You can sew a well-fitting skirt without knowing how to set pockets or sew a waistband or use a zipper foot or make a button hole! 

 Line up the skirt (or dress--in this tute, I'm using a very sketchy-looking thrifted dress whose fabric my kid loves), so that the point at which its flare matches the length of that chalk line are exactly lined up. Here is where you also make sure that the bottom hem of the skirt is exactly parallel to that chalk line--you don't want your skirt to hang weird! 

  2. Cut the two pieces of clothing along the marked line. Hold them down firmly to keep them from shifting, then cut them both at the same time. 

  3. Sew the skirt piece and pants piece together. Turn the skirt piece inside-out, then pin it, right sides together, to the pants piece so that the raw edges are lined up. Sew the two pieces together and then finish the seam. 

 My daughter and I used this skirt as part of her design for this year's Trashion/Refashion Show in our town, which is why it has Christmas lights safety pinned to it:  She paired it with a hooded shirt that I sewed from another pair of pants and a dressy blouse, and a cape that she cut out of an old fleece blanket, but I'll tell you about those another time!

Trashion/Refashion Show 2019: Gibbon Girl

It's fun to see how Syd has grown in the nine years that she's participated in our town's Trashion/Refashion Show:

2011: Fairy Princess

2012: Rainbow Fairy

2013: Rose Dress

2014: Upside-Down Orange

2015: The Awesomes (with WILL!!!)

2016: The Phoenix (which I sewed while sick with the flu)

2017: Supergirl of the Night (the last design that I helped Syd sew)

2018: Medieval Maiden (the first garment that Syd constructed completely independently)

And that brings us to 2019: The Year of the Gibbon!

These are Syd's application pictures, and every year they suck, because February is rarely well-lit. Oh, well. You can still see that Syd's vision is a caped black tunic and leggings (upcycled from a few black tops and sweaters that we thrifted). The highlight of the garment is a pair of sleeves that Syd can make look ruched, but can also make look like this:

She used a pair of pants for those sleeves, and later altered it so that she could have a secret pass-through for her hands when they're in their super-long formation.

Syd really, really liked the idea of sleeves that drape like a bridal train, but she also intended from the beginning that they could be fully weaponized, like so:

I love seeing her have so much fun with her design. From the very beginning, Syd's garments have always been playful, and most of them embrace big, powerful movement.

Her garments are never something that you simply wear; they're something that you DO:

 Our town's Trashion/Refashion Show is happily well-situated within our busy spring every year--it's generally about a month after cookie season, and about a month before Syd's birthday party. It's nice, because as soon as we finish planning for one thing, we can move right into the next!

The day of the fashion show is the hair/makeup call, then the stage rehearsal, then cooling our heels in the house while the other acts rehearse--

--then the pizza party--

--then the fun time of squeezing into a few square inches in the overcrowded dressing rooms backstage--

--and then I go sit in the audience with the rest of the extended family, and Syd?

She shines.

Here are some cheater pics that I took during the dress rehearsal:

And here's the real show:



This year's official show photographer has been taking photos for four years now, and he also created the slideshow that played between the acts. Check out this awesome tribute that he made for all of the Trashion Kids--he made a whole slide for each kid that he'd seen come back every year, and here's Syd's!

Look at how she's grown. Syd actually HATES it when people tell her how much she's grown (it's Nutcracker-related trauma on account of they cast by height and they're always looking for the shortest kids and it sucks), but look at the kid in those photos. She has grown! Syd has always been an artist, but she's become such an able DIYer, too, confidently constructing her vision garment from top to bottom, shoes to hairstyle. Those leggings? She sewed them from a stretchy black sweater, sure, but she also did it WITHOUT A PATTERN. No template. She didn't even trace another pair of leggings! She just... started cutting, sewed them up, and boom. Perfect leggings.

Perfect leggings. Smoky eye shadow that she applied herself. A garment with sleeves fit for royalty and suitable as long-range weapons.

I absolutely can't wait to see what this kids does next.