Taranaki Diocesan School for Girls student sews her way to nationals

Kassie Geerlings' (15) creation 'FernPelt the Warrior of Cats'. Photo / Supplied

Months of hard work and sewing have paid off for a Taranaki Diocesan School for Girls student.

Year 11 student Kassie Geerlings (15) recently placed at the regional Showquest Toi Wearable Art Awards for her masterpiece "FernPelt the Warrior of Cats". She will now move on to the national competition.

The Showquest Toi Wearable Art Awards is a wearable art competition for student designers run in collaboration with the World of WearableArt.

All entrants must be enrolled in a NZ school (including home school and correspondence school). Each student may only enter one entry and up to five students can work collaboratively on a garment. Students working together on a garment must be from the same school.

Kassie says she worked on the garment herself and is pleased she received first place for outstanding creative impact and second place for excellent garment construction.

"I'm very proud. The work I put into it took a lot of patience and time."

She says the name of her creation is inspired by her favourite book series "Warrior Cats" by Erin Hunter.

Kassie could pick from four of the design briefs: myths, legends and fantastic beasts, stories of the South Pacific, larger than life or city of the future, or she could enter the open brief.

"I changed from open brief to myths, legends and fantastic beasts."

She says she can not count the hours she worked on her design.

"It was months and months' worth of work. I would work on it whenever I had free time and spent most of the school holidays working on it leading up to the competition."

To create the base of the head and feet, she used foam that she carved into the right shape.

"It was a lot of trial and error finding the right foam. I recycled an old mattress layer for that and I had the other materials saved up for a while."

To create the custom patterns for the design, Kassie created a duct tape dummy.

She says she hand-sewed sow the patterns for the head, tail and feet.

"The tail itself had 50 individual pieces sewn together."

This wasn't Kassie's first time entering the competition.

"I first entered in primary school to get a feel of the competition."

Kassie says professionally photographs were taken of her creation and these will be used in judging for the nationals.

"I'm so excited to see what will happen at nationals."