Homestretch!

Hello All,

We are now in the homestretch!

Anyway, during the week, we created one of our finally designs. While we may overtime start adding more designs onto our websites, but we will not force anything, we will only add as we feel inspired. The new design we created is now dubbed the “Shining Moon”, as to symbolize the bleached crescent moon and the bleach fade around it with bleach dots representing stars scattered near it. This design is very different from our normal ones because unlike the others, the main design in on the back of the shirt. We also changed the name of our last shirt from “Full Heart” to “Full Orbit” because of the hearts that orbit around the edge of the t-shirt. This week we also put all of our designs so far on the website, however, the website is not yet functional.

Next week, we plan on finishing our website and having it become a fully functional store and complete the genius hour, year long journey! Then all that is left to do is the Ted talk and let the store its thing!

-Charlotte and Alyssa

Break-Through!

Hello All,

During this week made more progress with the website, and finally had a breakthrough! Some of our first products are finally displaying with a price, color choice, and the number of colors depends on the shirt design, and finally there are also five size options ranging from small to extra-large. The first product to be displayed was the “Fading Heart” design mentioned in the last blog. However, during this week we have created two more designs and put them up on the page as well. The first of the new designs has been dubbed, “Half-Hearted”, as half of the shirt, the bottom half, is bleached and the top half as a bleached heart on the pocket region. The second of the new designs has been named “Full Heart” because of the heart figures that occupy the bottom edge of the shirt all the way around the shirt. We will be making shirt as the demand goes up and the store starts functioning on its own.

Next week, we plan to add an option of a custom shirt option. However, we do need to discuss what that entitles and how different each shirt is allowed to be.

-Charlotte and Alyssa

Fading Heart

Hello All,

During this week we continued more work on the website, fiddling with it and trying to make it work. We also created a whole new shirt design and came up with the idea for a new shirt which is almost the opposite of the first new shirt. The new shirt will be called “Faded Heart” because there is a heart figure in the regular color of the shirt on the pocket space and the rest of the top portion of the shirt is beach-dyed to give it a faded look. The second new shirt is a bleached white heart on the pocket space and the bleach fade going upwards.

Currently, we are coming up with new ideas for shirts and maybe dress. We still do not yet know how many shirts or products that we want to make all together.

Next week, we will convene with our mentor to talk about how the transfer of the shirts will go as we are not as far as we thought we would be at this point. We will continue work on the website and making new shirts.

-Charlotte and Alyssa

Cross Our Hearts

Hello All,

During this week, we continued our work on the website, which will half serve as our final product with other half being the shirts and semi-dresses themselves. The website will have many different sections including an “about us” page, a “home” page, “contact us” page, and a actual “store” page. It might be struggle to work with weebly as neither of us are particularly experienced with using the website creator, weebly. This website let us create our own personalized website and lets us use a our own domain name, minus the .weebly.com.

Currently, we are creating our actual shirts and the product page on website. We want to have many different designs so everyone will be able to choose a style they like, the first of which being a desgin with hearts on the front and a cross on the back. We are also working with out mentor to get the shirts to Hands on Nashville.

Next week, we will work more on the website as this will be our biggest task since we aren’t particularly experienced in this realm. We how to be able to give you a snip it of what the website looks like soon!

-Charlotte and Alyssa  

Bleach-tastic

Hello All,

During this week, we convinced with our mentor and started to decide our main colors. When talking with our mentor we discussed, once again, the possibility of a website, and we all agreed that it was a necessity. The reason being, rather than relying on word of mouth a verbal agreement, we could have an electronic record of how much of everything we need. The second reason is this way we would be able to reach more people, rather than just school and community wide, we could reach as far as country-wide. Currently, we creating the first full-fledged draft of our t-shirt design. Originally, we planned to make shirts, dresses, shorts, and maybe even skirts; however, it's looking like realistically we only may be able to make the shirts and maybe t-shirt dresses, which has actually become a more popular style. The only problem we run into with the dress is that the sizes will be weird, and the proportions may not fit. Next week we plan to start creating a website and make more shirt, this time in different colors and come to a conclusion on our theme color. The choices are staying with our blog colors or making them a bit darker with hunter greens and blacks.

-Charlotte and Alyssa

Trial and Bleaching

Hello All,

During the last blog post we said we would be doing our first draft with the shapes, however, he decided to push that back further as we wanted to do our first shirt, our first draft as a normal shirt. This way we could learn how the bleach reacts with the t-shirt material, how long it takes for it to dry, and lastly how it does after a wash. A problem that we crossed was that the bleach spreads out from the area that it is put on, therefore, in the future we need to go slowly and put small amounts of bleach onto the material, if we want to come out with a coherent shape. We have not decided to make a certain amount of shirts and we also do not know how long it will take to make them, maybe two days per shirt. Although one thing we did decide on was that the shirts may have slightly varying prices depending on the design. Next week, we will make the actual first draft with the planned design.

-Charlotte and Alyssa

Dying Our Hearts

Hello All,

During this week the Vitam Dare crew started bleach dying our chosen cloth, made in a t-shirt form. Even though we have created many different designs, we decided to start with the design that has hearts on the front, in a silhouette shadow, with the bleach dyed part around the heart and and cross stretched across the back. But neither of the figures will look cookie-cutter, on the contrary they will be a little misshapen because for one, it looks cooler, and two, we want this to look handmade and full of love. The full of love part is another reason why we chose the hearts to do first because that is a key part of our entire project. One particular reason for the cross is that another key part of our project is our faith and incorporating that into the giving and creating of our clothes.

-Charlotte and Alyssa