Reduce, Reuse, Upcycle!

We were inspired by the amount of paper waste we have seen at CU Boulder, especially poster waste. We wanted to challenge ourselves to find a way to incorporate some of that paper waste into our clothing designs. As Californians, we often find ourselves much colder than the people around us. This sparked our idea to recycle the thrown away posters into our clothing as an extra layer of insulation.

Our clothes and accessories were built using a variety of recycled materials including paper waste from different trash and recycle bins around campus, donated used clothing, scrap fabric from other T9 participants, and other resources available from the T9 organizers/BTU lab.

One of the challenges we ran into was rolling the paper into small loops to fit in our pants. This method kept the paper from irritating the wearer of the pants with any of the sharp edges crumpled paper balls have. The meticulous process of curling each strip of paper took a couple hours though, which ate into our time. Another challenge we ran into was the issue of our pants not having a liner. We didn't have any experience sewing liners for clothing so we had to carefully make the measurements and test different fabrics for the stretchiest material.

We are proud of achieving our goal of putting together a cohesive multi-piece look. The task ahead of us seemed pretty daunting at first, especially considering we had only just met each other minutes before. Despite that, we were able to manage our time wisely and have a blast learning new skills together!

Between the two of us, we learned what a hackathon is/looks like, how to line pants, how to thread a sewing machine, how to properly walk a runway with confidence, how to make a balloon dog, how to iterate fashion ideas, how to use a seam ripper seamlessly, and more!

We hope you enjoy our final look. This has been Reduce, Reuse, Upcycle!

Built With

• sewing