My sewing experiments did more than find a new use for damaged outdoor gear. It opened my mind to a possible future career path.

One sunny afternoon in April, my friend Chloe and I found ourselves kneeling on the grass, stumped. We were taking a class on camping and outdoor skills, and the tent we were trying to put up was not cooperating.

I’m a junior at the Thacher School, a boarding school in Ojai, California. A big focus at our school is to give students opportunities to explore the outdoors. 

Before Thacher, I hadn’t spent much time in the backcountry. After two years at Thacher, I was still pretty clueless about camping gear. My feeling of outdoor incompetence was reinforced when Chloe and I, for some reason, could not get our tent to pop up properly as our classmates could. 

To my surprise, it wasn’t us: the tent and the fly didn’t match, and the tent fly was broken. 

Immediately, my mind raced to the potential of the broken material. I asked my teacher, Mr. Spaulding, if I could take home the broken tent fly and sew something out of it. He said, “You can take it. We have a ton more broken flies that we don’t know what to do with.” As it turned out, camping equipment broke frequently. Fortunately for me, I now had access to dozens of yards of high-quality waterproof material that would be very expensive to buy from a fabric store. 

Another one of my friends was wearing a boathouse jacket, and I pointed to it and said, “Imagine this, but made out of a tent fly,” and the idea for the jacket idea was born. 

My sewing journey: 

Almost exactly five years before that moment, I was eleven years old, and we were about a month into what would become several months of quarantine. There I was in my room, a Zoom class on my computer screen, but I was not watching. In fact, I couldn’t hear my teacher over the sound of my sewing machine while I toiled away on one of my first sewing projects.

My mom was an interior designer at the time, and she taught me to sew during the pandemic on her 2003 Baby Lock Pro-Line. We made masks out of curtain remnants and bags out of leftover upholstery from her client’s headboards and couches. 

My sewing hobby survived the COVID-19 pandemic and became a lasting obsession. I’d watch sewing tutorials for fun, and every birthday or Christmas present was a new patternmaking book or sewing gadget. 

After I mastered the tote bag, I began to analyze the seams on my clothes. I began to recognize the order in which seams were sewn, learn fabric composition by touch, and understand how 2D shapes make up 3D clothing. Over the years, my sewing repertoire has steadily expanded, and now I can say, “I could make that” about most clothing I see. 

Being deeply aware of the ‘how’s of garment construction ignited my curiosity about the ‘where’s and ‘who’s behind our clothes. I started reading about fast-fashion versus the sustainable-fashion industry, and that rabbit hole led me to aim for more sustainable living in general. In seventh grade, at my old school, I started a club called “Sustainability with Lola” as an outlet for everything I was learning. I was eager to continue this work in high school and I joined Thacher’s Environmental Action Committee (EAC) early into my freshmen year. 

Making the first jacket

Throughout that spring after the broken fly experience, I was excited to start my drawing up plans for the jacket, but I did not have the time for it until I went home, so my ideas remained theoretical. In June, while recovering from wisdom tooth surgery, I began working on my jacket pattern. My goal for this design was versatility: I wanted to create a piece that was functional enough for a rainy hike and attractive enough to wear to class or coffee. 

I noticed that many trendy, yet timelessly stylish outerwear pieces featured longer shoulder lengths, which gave the garment a boxier, looser fit. I wanted to emulate this style with my rain jacket because I noticed that many “technical” rain jackets, optimal for high-performance activity, had shorter shoulder lengths, which resulted in sleeves that fit closer to the body. A boxier fit is great for layering and still allows for mobility. 

Because this jacket was upcycled from a tent, I had a lot of fun with the stylistic placement of the material’s unique details. For instance, I kept half of the broken zipper on the bottom section. I remember laughing out loud when I kept the air vent in the back of the jacket. 

And I kept the Big Agnes logo on the side of the hood and placed half of a broken zipper where it would accentuate the seam between the top front and bottom pieces. 

After cutting the final loose threads, I was elated to have it finished. But I was not yet satisfied with this design, and I already could see ways to make improvements. I sent a photo to Mr. Spaulding, and he advised me to add more structure to the hood on my next one. 

Making the jacket took about two weeks from start to finish, and the whole time, I was looking forward to taking that photo and saying, “I did it.” When that moment finally came, I experienced what I like to call “sewing amnesia.” This term describes the feeling after finishing a project where I’m so excited about the final product that every ounce of the frustration from the long and strenuous process melts away and fades from my memory. I can say with confidence that this feeling is probably what keeps me unafraid to conquer more and more ambitious and technical projects. 

A New Year, A New Project

Shortly after returning to school in the fall, the EAC team met to go over plans for the year. Environmental activism in schools often loses momentum and hits roadblocks because students and teachers combat broad environmental issues with ineffective solutions, such as planting gardens without a plan to maintain them, or setting up special trash cans around school without a collection system to support them. 

I kept this in mind when thinking about the goals for expanding my tent jacket project. Instead of doing something small to solve a big problem, I wanted to do something big to solve a small problem. My pitch to our senior leaders and faculty advisor for this project was slightly different than previous initiatives I had worked on. In the past, I had taken a more community-oriented approach. For example, teaching repair workshops or facilitating second-hand clothing exchanges, but I never felt like these efforts fully came to fruition because they demanded time and cooperation from the student body to fully accomplish the goal. With my tent jacket project, the end result was dependent on how much I put into it, not the efforts of other people. 

Initially, I wanted help standardizing my pattern and learning more about sustainable manufacturing. I realized this did not have to mean starting from scratch and teaching myself everything I wanted to learn. I reached out to Thacher’s director of Alumni and Community Engagement, who put me in touch with Cara Bonewitz, a Thacher alum and the Senior Textile Designer at Patagonia. 

After our introduction, Cara kindly offered to take me on a tour of the Patagonia headquarters, where I got to receive feedback on my designs from product designers and patternmakers. I also got to visit their fabric testing lab, which opened my eyes to material science, an intersection between design and STEM, which was especially exciting because my favorite class this year is chemistry. Since I started sewing, whenever someone asked me if I wanted to become a designer, I was always hesitant to say yes because I was afraid of going into a field that felt unstable. This experience introduced me to the breadth of the sustainable fashion world, showing me that there was so much more to design than I had imagined and demystifying a potential career in the field. 

Take Two

In the following months, I decided I wasn’t looking to make a product to monetize, I wanted to refocus my project to fine-tune my design. It was time to make a second prototype. I repatterned my hood and researched new materials that would improve the jacket’s structural integrity, such as fusible interfacing and seam sealing tape for waterproofing. I used my time over winter break to apply all the changes I made and construct a new jacket. 

So I found myself at 8 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, at home, topstitching sleeve cuffs and trimming loose threads, working in a fever that overtook any desire for making other plans to celebrate the new year. And on the first day of 2026, I woke up without an ounce of regret and lots to celebrate because my jacket was finished. 

Now that I actually had the jacket, I was so excited to plan out how to present it. Up until that moment, I only had photos of it on my mannequin against my wall, so I was excited to return to school and organize a photo shoot where we could capture it worn by different people in different settings to fully capture what I envisioned of its versatility. 

But where I really felt my hard work pay off was when I laid the two jackets side by side in front of Cara and explained each specific detail that distinguished the first jacket attempt from the second. I was proud of the second jacket’s cinched hood and sleeve zippers themselves, but more than that, I was proud of the variance between the iterations that represented the work I had put into improving. 

High school students today are often seeking ways to engage with their communities or gain real-life experience through extracurricular opportunities, on top of schoolwork. However, this balance becomes difficult to maintain when we force ourselves to do things that don’t interest us. If I weren’t obsessed with sewing, it would have been easy to become burned out by this project: It was time-consuming, labor-intensive, and frustrating at times. But I started this project because I loved to sew, and I anticipated and even embraced the ache I would feel in my shoulders from cutting pieces out on the ground, and the dozens of hours I would spend ripping open and re-sewing seams. 

If I had to advise other students looking to take initiative, I would tell them not to look too far, but to find that thing that they love to do and are driven to do. I have a Post-it note taped to my sewing machine that reads “It’s your hobby, what’s the hurry?” I found the quote on a sewing blog while looking for a fleece jacket pattern, and I initially took note of it to remind myself not to rush the small but important steps like ironing and topstitching, but this project has since expanded my interpretation of the quote.

I think back to the prototype back in June, before big plans, before Patagonia, I was just sewing for fun. If I had “hurried my hobby,” and given up when I couldn’t figure out how to attach the hood, or pattern the collar, I would never have found the gateways that would give me the confidence to let my passion become my purpose. 

This probably won’t be my last tent fly jacket. I’m going to keep making tent jackets because I have fun doing it, and whatever I pick up along the way is a bonus. Even if I don’t become a textile engineer, this process taught me invaluable lessons in seeking mentorship, prototyping, and how far curiosity can take you. 

Want to slow down fast fashion? Read about another Bluedot Institute student who is using her platform to inspire change.