Students get to be fashion designers at one of CCISD Summer Camps

By BRITTANY FHOLER
Cove Leader-Press 

This week, a small group of girls in grades 4 through 6 have been meeting every day at Copperas Cove Junior High School for Fashion Design Camp, where they get to explore their creativity with creating fashion drawings and learning about different parts of fashion and what fashion means to them personally while building their self-esteem.
This camp is one of many offered this summer by the Copperas Cove Independent School District. It is led by Martin Walker Elementary music teacher April-Dawn Weimer, with assistance from fellow Martin Walker teacher Candice Bowers. 
The teachers even dressed up for the camp. Weimer wore a tropical green leaf print A-line dress, with a white long-sleeve blouse on top and coordinating tropical leaf wedges on Wednesday, while Bowers wore a yellow dress with a white hair bow and coordinating accessories. Weimer said that next to music, fashion is her passion. 
“Every day, I wake up, if I haven’t already planned out my outfit, and I think ‘What can I put together?’” Weimer said. “The reason I do that because it makes me feel good because if I just go out, and I don’t feel like I look the way I want to, it’s going to prevent me, I think, from really having the confidence to come and maybe talk to people that I might not otherwise talk to, or it might keep me in that little shy bubble that I don’t want to be in because you miss out on things if you’re not talking to people and getting to know them.” 
Weimer said that when she was younger in school, she was very shy, but she loved fashion and used fashion as a way to help her fight her shyness by wearing clothing that she loved. 
The two teachers watched and encouraged the group of girls Wednesday morning as they created posters featuring figures dressed in different fashions and designs and patterns.     
“We started our camp basically talking about fashion and what it means to us and how kind of it affects each of us, and I was sharing with them one of the main things that I would like for them to get out of this is to, in the end, be influenced to get their own ideas and then let their true personality come out through their clothing and not to let trends or whatever’s in fashion, prevent them from wearing what they enjoy wearing,” said Weimer. 
For the camp, each girl received a fashion book and a makeup book, provided by the district, with stencils inside and blank faces for the students to design and create their own looks and outfits. 
Each day, the students also write a journal entry on what they learned at their Fashion Design camp and what they discovered about themselves from the designs they made, etc. 
The group will finish their week of Fashion Design Camp today with a fashion show, complete with a “red carpet”, where they will wear an outfit that best represents them from their closet. 
“My goal is just to encourage them to just be themselves and to wake up every day and think about, ‘What do I like, when I look at my clothing? What is me? What do I like? What do I feel today?’” Weimer said. “Because people will see that in you and maybe inspire someone else to kind of go out of the box and not feel like you know, ‘Well, this isn’t in fashion,’ or ‘This isn’t in trend.’ That’s our hope, but the biggest thing is just to encourage them to be themselves.”
Catherine Boyarko, 10, showed off her poster, which featured a girl who worked for a pilot, two girls dressed for prom and another girl dressed in a summer outfit. Boyarko said she chose the Fashion Design Camp because of her love for fashion. 
Boyarko shared that she and her mom will work together to create outfits. Boyarko will draw them out, and her mom will bring them to life and sew them together. 
Boyarko said she loves to create outfits, so she has enjoyed the Fashion Design Camp. 
Hayden Hernandez, 9, said she chose the camp because her friend was in it, but also because she really likes fashion as well. She said she and her mom like to create new outfits and clothing from items they already own. 
She said the camp has been really fun, and the teachers have inspired her to do new things, like pairing different colors together to create a new pattern. 
Alyssa Hinton, 11, said she wanted to try new things with fashion and step outside of her normal style. 
“I’m kind of like cooped up, and I don’t do anything new,” Hinton said. “I kind of stay with the basic colors, so I’m going to try to go out of my comfort zone and make new stuff, and I have. I’ve made patterns and colors that I would never mix together.”
Alissa Collier, 11, said she also loves fashion. She said when she was younger, she wanted to be fashion designer as her career. 
“When I heard they had this camp, I told my mom I wanted to come here, and then I also, like the other Alyssa, wanted to come out of my comfort zone because I find myself trying to stick with a certain style a lot, so I was trying to create something new and have a new style,” Collier said. 
The Fashion Design Camp was one of more than dozen summer camps that kicked off Monday. The camps are offered by the district to combat learning loss.  are funded through Title I, ESSER and Department of Defense Education Activity grants. 
Another round of camps including math coding, golf, track, and others will begin on Monday, June 13. Parents interested in signing their child up for upcoming camps can visit the CCISD Summer Camp Portal at https://sites.google.com/site/ccisdportal/students/summer-camps-2022?fbc....