Sling and Mends: from Junk to Funk

A certificate or a degree in designing doesn’t have to translate into making fashionable clothes and shoes. A successful training spree should flower creativity and novelty. In other words, it should give rise to thinking that is different from the rest. There might be plenty of questions that touch upon this issue. How do you open a bottle when you don’t have an opener? What do you do with a broken ceramic plate? These questions are not for common thought processes! Ok, let’s come down to more basic stuff. Have you ever thought of making a newspaper dress? Take a look at the one here:

A Dress Made out of Old Newspaper

Now let’s take an imaginary look around your house. What would you do with a photo frame that you would no longer like to use? Throw it away or rather turn it into something beautiful? Take a look at one of the products here: an earing holder that has been made out of a broken photo frame.  

A transformed Photo Frame

If you love gardening then you would find yourself surrounded by broken pots. These are a common sight when people like to go green. Here’s what you could do with broken pieces:

Broken Pots as Garden Markers

And yes, drinking a lot of colas while shopping means that there are a lot of spare bottle caps lying around. These could be used to create adorable tea light candles for a wonderful dinner or decorating your home during Diwali! And the plus side: you don’t have to invest in fancy candles! 

Tea lights made from adding a wick combined with wax from melted crayons

Let’s pause here and think about these out of ordinary products. It is not easy to come up with creative ideas, such as those reported above, even though the items are rather too common. This is what training in fashion does to your untapped creative potential. But how does this really happen? Research shows that during the tenure of training students are subjected to basics such as pattern making, drawing and styling. Getting exposed to basic things like these trains your brain to extract patterns out of a lot of items and designs. Extraction leads to drawing common threads across disparate domains. This is the magic that works it way out and yields fantastic products!

Science shows that training molds the right part of the brain that is the center of creativity. Our brain is divided into the right and the left hemispheres. The left hemisphere is the seat for verbal reasoning and language whereas the right hemisphere is more responsible for spatial reasoning and drawing. In an untrained person, both hemispheres work together to support everyday function but it is also possible to train the right side of the brain with activities. And, training in fashion designing is one such example. By now you are already aware of the result in this regard!