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

Re-Stitching Our Plan

Hello All,

During this week we picked out the materials and colors of our first shirts, the ones we want to start with. This was one of the first steps of setting up our store, Vitam Dare. By creating a clothing store which gives most of its profits as donations to Hands On Nashville and gives one article of clothing for everyone bought to once again, Hands On Nashville we can attract a few colleges attention. The reason being that two sophomore girls have become entrepreneurs and created a business on a topic they’re passionate about while still incorporating service work to go with their love of helping others. If this kind of situation is put on a college application, it will help differentiate our applications from most all others students applying; therefore, we are more likely to get into that college, which is a bonus if it is our first choice.

This can help shape our life path because we can always refer back this experience and how we were about to problem solve new and uncertain situations. For example, when we were searching for a mentor we learned that not all people reply immediately to emails because they have their own schedules that do not coincide with ours. Because of this we are required to communicate through emails, this can cause information to be lost in transit. As sometimes one person has the information but cannot get ahold of this person, therefore, the other person must deliver the information.

-Charlotte and Munn