Jeanne Little is famous for adorning recycled household products in the name of fashion.

If nothing else, I thought the idea was novel and interesting.

I certainly didn’t expect the glamorous gown that had absolutely no resemblance to a tea bag.

The gown was designed and made by second year fashion design student Ashleigh Evans of Bodalla.

“I began the dress in preparation for my HSC two years ago but didn’t finish it to my liking, so I have treated it as a work in progress pulling it out whenever I felt like working on it,” Ashleigh said.

Ashleigh said that she was initially inspired by the works of local textile artist Jennifer Hawkins who made wall hangings using used teabags.

“First off I needed to collect copious amount of teabags,” Ashleigh said.

After Ashleigh had forced her parents to drink as much tea as they could handle she gave in and soaked about 800 more tea bags in the bath.

The used teabags were then dried.

“There were teabags drying on every window sill in the house and when there was no more room inside I started leaving them to dry outside the house,” Ashleigh said.

“After drying I had to carefully open each teabag, remove the tea and iron each piece.”

“I sewed the teabags in lines a lot like quilting and then sewed the lines together to produce the fabric that was about six metres long by a metre and a half wide,” she said.

After sewing and dying the fabric Ashleigh then ironed the fabric to a piece of interfacing to strengthen it.

The design for the dress was inspired from the Victorian era.

Ashleigh then cut out the pattern for the dress and a black silk taffeta lining before sewing the dress together and decorating the bodice with wool tops, novelty threads and dye treatments.

Each panel of the skirt represents a different landscape climbing upwards towards the bodice, representing the sky.