Newcomer to Hamline Fashion Club stitches together the first step towards a grand ideal
Before last year, Ricardo Martinez had never sewn anything. The extent of his clothing design had been creating team logos out of online presets, but after a short start at Fashion Club, he’s now sewing his way towards the perfect t-shirt. “Alisha talked me into it,” Martinez said referring to the club’s president and his friend, Alisha Bowen. “I mentioned how I wanted to learn how to sew,” and the rest was history, so to speak. She introduced him to Fashion Club and started teaching him the basics. “She brought a sewing machine into my room one night,” Martinez recounted, remembering how fun that night lesson was. Once he knew some basics, he wanted to participate. “The theme was recycled clothes,” Martinez said about the first show. Everything they made was to be made from discarded and donated pieces. “I originally wanted to make a shirt that was longer in length, but still tighter and kind of flowy-ish. Slimmer, longer, looser and kind of stretchy,” Martinez said. “[I wanted] a larger collar instead of being choked, slightly smaller sleeves and little things like that.” Even with a mental image of the top in his head, materializing it became a challenge. “It’s hard to do if you don’t have one, big piece of material,” Martinez explained. “A lot of the donation shirts had designs on them already. What I did from that point was see what I could use. I just thought of the basic parts of a shirt. There’s sleeves, there’s the body, there’s pockets and designs that are optional.” Looking at pieces from the donations, Martinez found his options for a body base between two choices: a black shirt or the white he chose. Otherwise, a lot were marked with Hamline designs or parts of the Anderson dining hall button-up uniforms. Working off the base, the next step was making it into something like his vision. “I didn’t wanna do just plain colored sleeves because I didn’t want to make a shirt you’d already find.
I had to be a little more original— creative.” That’s when flannel sleeves were added out of a pair of shorts turned into the arms of his top. “That was also tricky because they were female shortshorts that didn’t really have enough material.” With help again from Bowen, he figured out a way to use the minimalistic shorts to add the accent sleeves. But the shirt still wasn’t completed. The last element to add was a pocket. “I made it in a spot it isn’t usually in,” Martinez said of its placement on the lower right of the shirt. Besides its location, the pocket’s size stood unique. “I felt like it’s comfortable to have a pocket down there, and I also made it extra big…” He demonstrated, putting his entire hand into the black pocket. The last step was showing it off. “At first I was like, ‘I don’t know about this.’ It was out of recycled clothes,” Martinez said, but he found validation at the show. “Some people came from other schools [and said] ‘Wow, I actually wanna wear that.’ ” Inspired by the feedback, Martinez plans to continue in Hamline Fashion Club and to keep chasing his first idea: the perfect t-shirt.
the quest for the perfect t-shirt Words and photos by Franki Hanke
Fall/Winter 2017 • 14
