By Reese Meister
A talented soccer and football player, an enthusiastic crafter and the only third-year student enrolled in the Advanced Environmental Design course, junior Teagan Ickes excels in all that she is passionate about.
Ickes’ motivated mindset lends itself well to her business, 13 Stitches, where she sells handmade items including tote bags and dog bandanas. Ickes has been sewing ever since second grade when her mom enrolled her in sewing lessons.
Originally, Ickes made masks for an acquaintance who ran an Etsy shop during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, when the business slowed, Ickes expanded the variety of products she made and began her own business.
“I started my business when I was thirteen,” Ickes said. “I would put all the masks and dog bandanas in my parents’ schools, and in my aunt’s school, too. And so, then, that’s how it kind of all started, and now it’s grown.”
Running a business has presented Ickes with valuable experience and a changed perspective on her work.
“Something I’ve learned from running my business is that you can often be taken by surprise,” Ickes said. “You won’t expect when something is gonna go really well … I feel like I’ve grown so much in the last couple of years and that over time, you get a lot of learning experiences as well.”
While Ickes has enjoyed collecting knowledge as a business owner, she also admires the creative freedom that she has gained from her Advanced Environmental Design course.
“I like that you get to just be creative … there are certain rules and regulations you have to follow, but you get to kind of take whatever you’re feeling and reflect it onto the space,” Ickes said. “You can make a space really exciting, or you can make a space really relaxed and calm.”
Throughout her years in Environmental Design classes, Ickes has worked on everything from kitchens to bedrooms to offices. In the past two years, she has created state-required projects, competing for Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA), an organization for Career and Technical Education (CTE) classes that help prepare students for specific careers.
“Last year, our project that we competed with at regional and state was a troubled youth center,” Ickes said. “There was an apartment I had to [redesign], and then I had to redesign counseling spaces and a kitchen and stuff like that.”
This past February, Ickes placed first in her regional competition, and she finished second in the state competition in April, where she was judged on her design for converting a warehouse into a dog rescue. She will take this same project to the national competition in Seattle this summer from June 29 to July 3. However, as much as Ickes enjoys and finds success in designing, she shares how it is more difficult than it may seem.
“For me, personally, the most challenging part is time management because there’s a lot of work that goes into it,” Ickes said. “Design-wise, I would say proportions are really difficult … [In] my first year, I was really bad … I had no clue how to scale anything, but [in] the last few years, I have kind of figured it out.”
Ickes gives insight into how complicated the design process truly is, especially converting her work from paper to technology. Despite the challenging process, though, she is willing to take the extra time to make her work the best it can be.
“I do everything on the iPad, so the proportions on the iPad are different than the proportions on paper. So you have to do math every single time you’re drawing stuff because the pixelation on an iPad is different than the grid on the graphing paper,” Ickes said. “It’s a lot, but it looks so much better on the iPad, so that’s why I do it.”
Interestingly, Ickes originally had hoped to enroll in the Fashion Design pathway, but she was placed in Environmental Design when there was not enough space in the class. Now, having enjoyed the class so much, she considers interior design as a potential career option.
“I’ve thought a lot about going into interior design for a career. I think it’s still a back-pocket option,” Ickes said. “It’s kind of opened me up to a different kind of aspect of art, and I feel like if I changed my mind on what I want to do in the future, that’s probably what I’ll end up going to.”
Right now, Ickes is the only student in the course for a third year, meaning her experience is quite different from that of a typical class. There are just fourteen enrolled in the pathway as a whole, meaning students of all levels are in a single period.
“Some days I practically teach the class, some days I’m learning just as much as everyone else,” Ickes said. “It’s interesting, I think, because there’s nobody else that’s working on the same stuff that I am, so it’s like I have no one to really compare with. So I feel like I’m kind of on my own a little bit.”
Ickes hopes that more students will enroll in the Environmental Design pathway and be able to enjoy it the way she has.
“I feel like most people don’t really know that we even have the class here because it’s not really well advertised, but it’s really fun,” Ickes said.
Ickes’ experiences both inside and outside of the classroom have not only shaped her own enthusiasm for design; they have allowed her to share this passion with others.
This article was originally published in the 2024 RED Magazine. Stop by room 306 to pick up a copy.
