When Molly O’Brien was just 8 years old, she was hand-sewing pillows with her grandmother and making dresses out of newspaper at a fashion camp in Kentucky.
Now, at 17, the Fort Collins high school senior is a contestant on the second season of Lifetime’s “Project Runway Junior,” a show that is notorious for asking contestants to create beautiful, wearable garments out of unconventional materials.
“You just treat (newspaper) like fabric in a lot of terms, doing things like pleating,” O’Brien said. “But a lot of the time you have to use hot glue or hand sewing. It was kind of hard to learn to use those paper materials because you have to work differently.”
Certainly, she knows about working differently: Last year, she created a dress out of book pages for a project at Rocky Mountain High School.
But O’Brien is not just about working with wacky materials: She also has her own clothing line, Molly Elizabeth Designs.
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