Custom Pieces
One-of-one garments engineered by hand from reclaimed textiles.
Every piece shown here is built from discarded clothing and secondhand fabrics, but nothing about the process is accidental.I’ve studied garment construction since the age of ten and trained under custom couturiers who taught me to look beyond silhouettes and into structure: stitch length, fabric weight, grainline, needle thickness, and how a material behaves after years of wear. I draft patterns by hand using traditional flat-pattern methods, adjust for fabric history and fatigue, and sew by machine or hand depending on what the garment requires.
Reworking existing textiles demands more precision than working with new yardage. Fabric quality, fiber content, and previous use determine everything - from seam choice to finishing techniques. I treat every reclaimed material as both a limitation and a gift.
These garments are not replicas, trends, or experiments. They are singular pieces, made slowly, with intention, and finished to last.
These vintage nautical curtains, likely from the 1950s or ’60s, had spent decades in the sun (and it showed). I carefully deconstructed the curtains, cutting around areas where the fibers had become too damaged to save, then reinforced the remaining fabric from behind. Strategic appliqué stitching follows the existing motifs in the print, disguising the reinforcement as part of the original design. What looked like fabric destined for the trash became a pair of wide-leg culottes built for another lifetime of wear.
Inspired by Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors,” I made the above coat for my little sister from the scraps left behind by other projects. Rather than simply piecing together a patchwork coat, I first joined the individual remnants to create an entirely new piece of yardage, then treated that textile as I would any other fabric: drafting, cutting, constructing, and finishing the garment from it.
Six discarded pairs of jeans became the raw material for this dress. I developed the pattern around the usable areas of each pair, deliberately placing different washes, seams, and shades to turn the limitations of the existing garments into part of the design. One oversized pair offered a fun detail opportunity: its original hem was wide enough to become the finished hem of the dress itself.
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For her birthday, one little girl had a very specific request: an ice cream dress. At almost exactly the same time, a friend gave me an ice cream-print dress that she loved in theory but never loved wearing. I salvaged the fabric and gave it a second life as the skirt of the special birthday dress, designed and made especially for its very excited new owner.
Working with reclaimed textiles means starting with what already exists: the dimensions, the damage, the previous construction, and the history held within the material. My job is to understand those limitations well enough to turn them into design decisions.