Wedding dress up-cycling for school Eco Festival
As a wedding dress designer, I just love a mood board…whether it’s on Pinterest, or at the kitchen table with a pair of scissors, magazines and glue.
When the chance to TEACH mood-boarding came up at my daughter’s school as part of their Eco Festival recently, I jumped at the chance.
I’m not a qualified teacher, so the Head of Science and the Head of PE helped me run the session for a room full of enthusiastic and stylish 10 year olds. I was able to share my passion for upcycling and re-purposing through the medium of wedding dresses.
The theme for this part of the school’s Eco Festival, was litter, energy and waste. The children were learning about the life cycles of products, through a range of different activities, one of which was an arts and crafts day. This was where I came in, demonstrating and introducing the children to some different techniques related to up-cycling.
The idea was to inspire the children to really think about their own taste, and to express their personality through styling, art and design, when approaching an upcycling project.
I shared a number of re-purposing techniques, such as dyeing, silk painting, card-making, taking a pattern from a garment to re-use it, as well as sewing.
We then looked at how to upcycle a plain wedding dress to become something very unique and the children were able to dress a mannequin to create their own look.
Everyone had their pick of some bridal catalogues from the last bridal trade show I attended, and created their own colour schemes and mood boards to take home and keep.
If this situation happened to present the opportunity to try on some veils and tiaras, then who was I to stand in the way of fun!
The school is on a journey towards becoming an international Green Flag Award Eco-School, and their mission is to raise their understanding of the environmental issues facing our world, and how we can contribute, in even the smallest ways, to a more sustainable future.
The programme is designed to raise environmental awareness amongst young people and in England it is run by environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy.
The Eco-Schools programme empowers pupils, raises environmental awareness, improves the school environment and can also lead to financial saving. The hope is that being an active member of the programme will inspire children to make informed choices, now and in the future, that will benefit the health of our planet.
Thank you to Laura Reglar for the beautiful images, and to the Year 5 and 6 girls who took part in the day: Alice, Iris, Daisy, Grace, Phoebe, Josephine, Imogen, Yasmine, Tamara, Ioni, Isla, Margot, Cressie, Olivia, Megan, livvy, Poppy, Naomi and Emily.
