Narrabri girl creates cotton dress to educate people on cotton processes

The Year 12 student has invested hundreds of hours into creating a dress made from cotton materials to help educate people about the process cotton goes through from farm to store. The dress is currently on display in the Narrabri information centre.

Issy grew up at Blue Hills, a cotton farm in Narrabri, but boards at Loreto Normanhurst in Sydney where she is doing design and technology as a higher school certificate (HSC) subject. The dress is her major work for the HSC and is accompanied by a necklace of cotton bolls and three banners detailing the process she went through.

The dress was created in a number of parts and was complex to construct, so she had a helping hand from her teacher Jenelle Minto. The bodice is made from raw and ginned cotton and Issy used free-hand machine embroidery to create a fabric out of the fibres.

“We made the pattern of cotton bolls and leaves, and it held the cotton down and allowed us to use the fabric on the dress,” Issy said. 

“We really struggled to find ways to attach the raw fibres to the dress, so what this method does is it allows you to sew along the fibres so you can attach them down, and that just held them down and made it nice and secure.”

The midriff was made of carded, combed and roved cotton, and yarn, while the bottom was voile. The yarn was crocheted into flowers, which line the bottom of the bodice.

“Voile is just a type of cotton fabric. It’s quite light,” Issy said. 

“When we had the layers, it made it a bit of a mermaid style… It fitted nicely and draped nicely.

“What we did on the bottom of that, as well, is dye it in red cabbage to an ombre, to show what some of the end product can look like.

“I literally bought red cabbages from the supermarket and you boil them with a bit of salt for, like, an hour, and when you take the cabbage pieces out, you are left with blue. Then you add a few tablespoons of vinegar and it makes it a pink.”

Issy said that, when she started Year 12 in term four last year, she knew she wanted to make a dress for her major work because she had been doing sewing since Year 8 and “loved it”.

“I really wanted to keep doing it, and with the HSC a lot of it is just studying… but this dress was just a way I could get away,” she said.

“From there I just went into the part of showing people how cotton is turned into a fabric. Because I grew up on a farm, lots of people ask me about it.”

Issy started drawing up designs at the start of this year and after creating three developed designs, she cemented a final design. During this time, she also visited the CSIRO fibre mill in Melbourne and the Queensland Cotton gin near Wee Waa.

“I didn’t really understand what actually happens [after the cotton leaves the farm] and I got a really good idea,” she said.

“I got all the fibres for the dress from the gin and the carded, combed and roved cotton from Melbourne, and then I just got the rest from home.”

The 17-year-old started experimenting with the materials halfway through term two to give her time to work through any issues that might crop up.

“We initially decided to sew the [carded cotton] into seams along the top of the dress, but that didn’t work because the fibres pulled out and came loose, so then we experimented sewing bolls onto the top of the dress to stop the fibres from pulling out,” she said.

“Once we finished the experiments we then moved on to making the dress, so we started that at the beginning of this term – probably around the start of May/June. We started out by cutting all the pieces from the fabric. We went down the dress, starting at the top and moving to the bottom.”

Issy soon discovered that the work needed careful handling.

“We had to wrap it in tissue paper every time I stopped working on it, because it was just so fragile, and also we had a few issues with the bodice because when we were laying out the fibres and sewing on top of them, some areas weren’t as thick as they were supposed to be so they almost tore when you sewed them together, so we had to interface it,” she said.

“I worked on it the whole term at school all during prac lessons in class, and one afternoon and I also had a sewing machine up in the dorm, so I worked on it some afternoons.

“The first week of the holidays, I was at school in Sydney working on the dress every day.

“I hadn’t really anticipated how long it would actually take. Every time I started a new section of the dress, I ran into issues or ran out of materials and it just took so much longer.”

Issy finally conquered all of the challenges and completed the dress on July 9. 

“It didn’t really hit for a couple of days after I finished it that it was done, because it’s just been so much work and every time I finished a section, there was always more to do,” she said.

“It was just like a lift off my shoulders.

“I’m really happy with it. I’m happy that it turned out and I got it done and it looks the way it does.”

Issy said her family was really impressed with the finished product and it had made an impact on display.

“The first couple of days it was in the information centre I had a lot of families contact me and say it was amazing and they were really impressed with what I’d done,” she said.

“I really hope it does [educate people] because I’ve really tried to draw it out and make sure the process is clearly visual, and I’ve tried to make sure the banners have enough that they understand how the process actually happens.”

At the end of the week, the dress will be returned to Issy’s school, where it will await marking in August for the HSC.

Despite her passion for design, Issy said she was unsure of what path she would follow after school.

“Next year, I’m planning on taking a gap year because I don’t really have an idea of what I want to do after that. I know design is an option for me and I have looked into it a bit, but I haven’t really made a decision about it yet,” she said.