My favorite Project Runway challenge of all time has to be from Season 3 when Tim Gunn takes the contestants to a recycling plant in New Jersey and tells them that they have to make outfits out of what they find in the bins. Recycled crafts are amazing to me, because they say so much. Sure, we all love Joann’s Fabrics, A.C. Moore and their ilk, but using recycled materials is a total different beast. It takes a special kind of creativity to look at something that’s already a full formed object in and of its self, and be able to not only mentally deconstruct it into raw materials, but then reconstruct it into something else. And, on top of the creative elements, the ecological message it sends is awesome. Almost everything can be reused. The days of consumption and discarded waste are through. We have to move towards reinventing what we have in abundance: trash. This long diatribe is build up to a fashion designer named Nancy Judd and her “Recycle Runway” project. Judd creates haute couter out of such non-traditonal materials as junk mail, rusty nails, the phone book, ribbons of VHS tape and more. Her fashions are traveling around the nation in a series called “Recycled Runway: The Airport Project,” where they are showcased in airports nation wide. See a sample of her work below. She made this cocktail dress by cutting out shapes from old coke cans and sewing them to fabric. How divine!