Ever since I was 6, I would remember trotting along the familiar blue-stained carpets in the middle of Saint Vincent DePaul, becoming a staple pattern of my childhood. My small hands would lace together underneath the warmth of my mom's cotton gloves, as I ran underneath the hung-up coats donated by those around town. I would explore and shift my way through the aisles of coats, jackets, crewnecks, and shirts. Running my fingers through layers of clothes, watching colors shift and fade from bright reds to dark crimsons, to chartreuse greens and mosaic blues. The beauty of art and design seemingly ‘hidden’ within fashion had always interested me, and in subsequent years, enveloped into not just an interest, but a hobby and job. 

In my sophomore year of high school, I faced the death of my grandpa, who was somebody I had always looked up to. Though for years beforehand he could not talk directly to me, due to several strokes and a heart attack, I had worked on rebuilding and constructing a relationship with him as I grew up, without words. It was my first experience of creating something physically, that meant something mentally. So, by writing on paper or signaling to each other, we were able to still communicate in ways we weren't able to before, taking some good away from the bad around us. However, in January of that year, he passed away while in the hospital, leaving my family with a standstill of emotions, questions, and words we regretted we said sooner.

From having such a close relationship with him, and seeing him every week, all of a sudden those common actions became lost forever, and the only memory I had of him was his house, until months later, when it was sold. On our last day visiting the house, we gently walked across the dusty house and creaky floorboards, until I rested my eyes upon a big crate of stacked boxes leaning against each other. The words “CLOTHES” were printed across the side of one in sharpie. Unboxing these, we were left with hundreds upon hundreds of ripped and torn flannel prints, and wrinkled jeans with stains across every inch of them. Though my dad told me, “You don’t have to take those if you don’t want to.” I felt like, without this house by us, this is most likely the only thing I could keep to have a memory of him in. 

So, we took these old boxes home, and let the dust from them fly off across the ground in my room. Opening them back up, I took out the stacked layers of clothes and laid them against my floor, grabbed the only sewing machine we had in storage, and got to work. For hours on end, whether it was researching or working, I would take these old shirts, and pants, and figure out how to fix them. So, after several days of working, I had finally finished this grand collection of clothes, all sewn back together, removed as many stains as I could, and cleaned them over and over again. Whether it was restoring clothes, running through the layers of them within Goodwill, or making them myself, clothing and fashion have been something that has taken me to places I could’ve never imagined, and brought me self-confidence and passion within this art. Similar to what it was with my grandpa, it gives me the artboard of expressing myself without having to use words but instead using my creative insight and materials around me to make something nobody has seen before.