E-Mail This Article to a Friend ID CHECK Trash fashionista BY CAMILLE DODERO

name: Ivy Glass

age: "28, but I look 18"

resides: Jamaica Plain

weapon of choice: scissors

Ivy Glass is her real name — she swears. "My middle name’s Lynn. If [my name] was fake, I’d be, like, Ivy Green Glass."

She also might have made it more representative of her métier. Ivy Glass isn’t a gardener, an academic, or a window-washer. She designs clothing out of recycled goods. The 28-year-old has made outfits from curtains and upholstery. She’s turned a rib-less umbrella into a skirt. She’s pieced together wide-bottomed raver pants from Star Wars sheets. She’s found those plastic six-pack holders on the street and sewn them on dresses. She’s even assembled a ruffled frock out of Wonder Bread bags. (These were recovered from the garbage, too: Glass’s fiancé Andrew, a Museum of Fine Arts School grad, participated in a group art show called "Toast" and covered gallery walls with crispy brown bread for his installation.)

Call it trash fashion or bag-lady chic — Glass plans to work under the rubric Recoverwear. "For me, it’s just really important to use materials that nobody wants anymore," she explains in her Jamaica Plain studio last Monday, among brightly colored wool scraps, cutting patterns, and garment-stuffed plastic bins. "[My work is] about counteracting the whole reliance on manufacturing of new materials. It’s such a waste."

A day manager at the Harvard Square consignment store Second Time Around, Glass hunts down her resources the usual way: thrift stores, Goodwill, the Garment District. "Everything I buy is from local businesses," she says. But unlike most designers, she doesn’t try to hide the innards of her craft. She actually puts the seams on the outside of her pieces. "I love to take things apart and put them back together." She likes that it shows.

One of Glass’s most inventive salvaged-trash pieces is a bustier sewn from stuffed-animal parts. Ascending a wooden ladder to a tree-house-like storage loft, she retrieves the piece and ties it on a headless mannequin. The green straps are two halves of a parrot’s head. The right-breast cup is a gray fox’s face; the left, a white tiger with a brown snout. When Glass modeled the furry creation at a fashion show, she remembers, "People kept coming up to me and being like" — her hands hover over the stuffed-animal faces — "those are cute!" One woman thought the concept was so clever that she commissioned Glass to create a similar piece for her to wear to an Animal Rescue League fundraiser.

Glass, who graduated from the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, has been shredding her closet since she was a child. To this day, the Philly native credits Jennifer Beals’s naked shoulder as one of her earliest stylistic influences. "I was wearing this the other day," she says, tugging on the tangerine Adidas sweatshirt with a cutoff shoulder she’s wearing. "Someone was like, ‘Flashdance!’ That’s what I used to watch: that and Fame." Back in the ’80s, she also wore leg warmers over her pants. "I didn’t want to look like everyone else," she says, recalling that the first time she thought about designing outfits was after a kindergarten disaster. "I had to be in this fashion show and they made me wear something really ugly. Some 1970s corduroy thing with a turtleneck. I was like, ‘That’s it! I’m just going to make my own clothes!’"

At the moment, Glass is focused on producing winter accessories — it’s damn cold here for a Philly native — specifically hats and scarves she makes out of old sweaters. "I love to cut things," she says, offering to demonstrate the beginnings of her small-scale hat-production process on her worktable. First, she picks out old sweaters that are sorted into bins by color, then traces her hat patterns onto the wool with a marker. "I feel like Martha Stewart. ‘Then you take the marker, and then the ruler, and place it just like so.’ Don’t sniff the marker at home, it would not be healthy. I know: I’ve sniffed mine before and it’s not good!"

Ivy Glass will be at the Bazaar Bizarre this Sunday, December 11 at the Cyclorama, the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street | 1 pm to 8 pm | www.bazaarbizarre.org/boston