Walking down Seventh Avenue in New York City in the peak heat of July, junior Esther Walker knew exactly where she wanted to explore on the last day of her trip.
She beelined through the city blocks to a multi-floor fabric shop called Mood Fabrics in the Garment District.
Immediately after entering the shop, she took the elevator up to the third floor — the fashion fabrics. Her eyes caught on a dazzling pink and gold brocade fabric, and she knew she couldn’t leave the gorgeous fabric’s potential on that shelf.
Since age 5, Walker’s been dreaming about making her own homecoming dress, and she felt that this brocade fabric would make the dress exactly like she’d envisioned for years.
She snapped a picture of the tag so when she was home, she could calculate how much fabric she would need for the dress, and order the exact amount of fabric straight from the Garment District.
“I didn't know what I was gonna do with it, but I was like, I need something made out of this fabric, because it's so pretty,” Walker said.
Walker’s sewing hobby started on her fifth birthday when she got a sewing kit, which consisted of items like needles, scissors and a pincushion. She used the same one until she was 10, making trinkets like clothes for stuffed animals out of fabric scraps. On her tenth birthday, she received a classic Singer sewing machine from family friends.
Walker had never used a sewing machine before, so she took the “Driver’s Ed for Sewing Machine classes” at Harper’s Fabric and Quilt Company in Overland Park, which taught her how to operate her machine.
“It was just very basic fabrics, or like very basic projects when I was younger, [and] I really just used cotton. I've started getting into more fashion fabrics and focusing more on apparel. That's definitely a world of its own, and I've learned a lot from that,” Walker said.
During her sophomore year, she looked into some of the sewing classes offered at Johnson County Community College because she had an extra hour in her schedule.
Walker enrolled in Apparel Construction 1 at JCCC, which is intended to teach students clothing construction principles, techniques and skills in apparel construction. She hoped that this would help her refine the self-taught sewing skills she already had.
“I’ve learned a lot of things that I knew how to do by hand, but didn't know how to do on a machine,” Walker said. “So I've learned about how to operate a machine, like buttonholes and invisible zippers were one of them. And I learned a machine-invisible hem.”
For many of her projects, she creates her own patterns. After coming up with ideas almost immediately, Walker sketches it out in her notebook, measures herself and then pins all the pieces and sections of the clothes on her dress form.
This year, Walker spent two months designing and altering the self-made pattern of her homecoming dress — the longest she's ever spent on a sewing project. It took Walker six different mock-up dress patterns before she could order the fabric.
Once she finished the alterations on the pattern, she ordered the fabric from New York and then started to construct the dress. Because it took her longer than she’d anticipated to build the correct pattern, she ended up having only a week to sew her dress with the actual fabric.
“The homecoming dress is a favorite [of mine] that she had that image in her mind this summer when she saw that fabric, and she just made it come to life,” Walker’s mom, Karen Siebert, said. “It was fun to see it all work and put it all together.”
Walker's friend and junior Annie Trenkle hears about the projects and skills that Walker is learning in her JCCC class and at home.
For every step of each project, especially Walker’s homecoming dress, Trenkle receives strings of Snapchat videos from Walker detailing her vision for. This is something Trenkle cherishes, and she loves to see the progress Walker makes throughout the videos.
“I just think it's so special how passionate she is about it and how she channels her creativity into it in a way that you don't see a lot of people do,” Trenkle said. “The fact that she just takes it and runs with it, and she makes her ideas come to life.”
Walker doesn’t plan on going into a career in sewing or fashion, but she enjoys having a unique and creative hobby she can spend time on.
Sewing is a valuable hobby, whether it's hemming a skirt or replacing buttons on a top, according to Siebert.
“[With] something like painting, you only have so much room on your walls for that,” Siebert said. “Whereas [with sewing], it's a little easier, and you get to share it with the world in the way that you're walking around and getting to wear it.”
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