“Yeah, I would wear that in real life,” said Senior Julia Bedynek about the dress she and teammates Hallee Cowan and Lune Carlsson created from an unexpected material--toilet tissue.
PHS fashion design students recently worked with the unconventional material to create dress designs. To complete the project, the students had to do some historical research, sketch design boards, create gowns, and dress the manikins to be displayed in the PHS Library.
Dr. Lisa Muller, PPS Superintendent, spent some time with the aspiring fashion design students learning about their creations. Muller enjoyed the display and remarked on the creativity the students expressed in the design of the dresses and in the instructor’s lesson development.
“I was so impressed with the wide range of styles reflected in the dresses, and the student’s descriptions of the problem-solving required to create these gowns,” Muller said. 
Career Tech Instructor Sharon Rash’s students worked in teams to create their designs which included examples from the Renaissance period, the nineteenth century, the Hollywood Regency period, and the modern era.
Cowan, Carlsson, and German foreign exchange senior Julia Bedynek worked together to design a modern formal.
We wanted something super elegant, and obviously, something with sparkle,” Cowan remarked. Inspiration for the dress was a cultural fusion of ideas. “I worked with girls from other countries and they took their European inspiration and added it to the dress as well. We worked well together. We had some ideas that may have not worked well, but we found better ideas that helped us put our dress together in the end.” Cowan said.
“It was so good we had the same goals, and we had the same ideas. We let different cultures come into it like for example, New York and Berlin, one of the centers in Europe for fashion. It is an inspiration for a wedding dress, very modern but also very chic,” explained Bedynek.
Working with toilet tissue was challenging, Bedynek said, “We sewed toilet paper together to create pleats. I actually sewed toilet paper together. That took me five days; it was rough.”
Formal elegance also inspired Junior Kylie Knight’s team. Marilyn Monroe was the inspiration for the Hollywood Regency gown. “We chose Monroe because she was really iconic; she had a look, and you knew it was hers. If you look back in history, like that’s Marilyn, that’s old Hollywood,” said Knight, “We all just liked the style. It wasn’t too easy, but it was still doable with toilet tissue.”
Knight explained that the challenge was “figuring out how to work with the material; it is not something you would normally use to sew with and so we had to figure out how to use it and make it look nice and elegant on a manikin.”
A common experience inspired Junior Lydia Vermillion’s group. Several members of the group had been to the Renaissance Fair, and the group called upon their common experience to create their period piece. “It was a really cool period to draw inspiration from because it has a very specific look, Vermillion explained. “The corset was an interesting challenge, having to paper mache it but making sure it didn’t stick to the manikin.”
Part of the process was discovering the right techniques for working with material. While applying the paper for the corset Vermillion “learned that if you apply a specific amount of pressure it will make it more smooth, and if you do it a certain way, it will give it different amounts of texture. It was just really interesting to make a dress in like two weeks out of a very unconventional material.”
Freshman Natalie Barlet agreed teamwork was important when working with “the difficulties of the material, especially when working with creating volume.” Barlet’s team created a dress that included a bustle which the team made by scrunching up toilet tissue.
Beyond fashion design and construction skills, the students picked up valuable teamwork experience as well. “There wasn’t one moment where anyone said, I don’t want to work; everybody worked and everybody brought in their own ideas,” and Bedynek concluded, “Working together as a team also includes putting people in and motivating them.”
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