Venessa Lee
ANN/THE STRAITS TIMES – Gini Ika Jayanti, 38, recently made an outfit out of some 200 disposable face masks.
Over two days, the domestic helper from Surabaya, Indonesia, created the multi-colour dress using a hot glue gun. The floor-length skirt comprises layers of pink, coral, lilac, green and blue, with an ombre effect.
Wearing this “rainbow dress”, she recounts how she folded its puff sleeves into floral shapes before stapling them to the dress, which is cinched at the waist with a ribbon.
Even her earrings are repurposed. She removed the ear loops from several disposable masks, twirling and gluing them onto felt circles joined with wire, to make dangling earrings.
Gini has long had a passion for sewing, a hobby that is fully supported by her Dutch expatriate employer, Fieke Korporaal, 41.
Gini, who is not married and has worked in Singapore for 12 years, said, “I love the environment and mostly use recycled items.”
She has made dresses from materials such as toilet paper rolls and disposable Nespresso capsules. Her employer’s sons helped her collect the coffee capsules before she cleaned them, sorted them by colour, flattened them with a hammer, then sewed them into a dress last year.
She also uses materials such as crepe paper and garment bags, and scours small shops in Chinatown for accessories like small wires and buttons. Gini first thought of making a dress from pandemic masks about five months ago. She said, “I got this idea because of COVID-19. What if, one day, nobody were wearing masks and there was no coronavirus? I could have a memory of all these things.”
Inspired by YouTube videos and Pinterest posts, she labours over her sewing machine in her room during her free time in the evenings and on weekends. She made a gown earlier this year from about 350 blue disposable masks, which Korporaal has tried on.
Gini started working for Korporaal, her fifth employer, in January last year. Korporaal, a 41-year-old business development manager at a trading company, recalled asking Gini about her hobbies during her job interview.
“Gini showed me pictures of the dresses she had made, one from plastic bags. She is so creative,” said Korporaal, who is married to a 42-year-old capital and fund manager in the real estate sector. The couple have three sons aged seven, 10 and 12. “I wanted to know what makes her happy. If she is happy, we as a family will be happy. I think it’s important to have proper helper welfare and to develop her further.” Korporaal encourages Gini’s sewing aspirations by urging her to build her social media presence with her Instagram account (@putri_tikusart). She has also spent at least several hundreds on 11 mannequins and dress dummies that Gini uses for measurements, some of which are displayed in the living room of Korporaal’s three-storey home in Bukit Timah.
With Korporaal’s help, Gini has exhibited her dresses in a couple of small-scale art exhibitions and together they have attended sustainability-themed gala fund-raising events. Gini said, “She has supported me a lot. I’m so happy. She is my dream employer.”
Korporaal said, “My goal is that she can make a living out of this, so she can do this full-time and she won’t be a helper eventually. She has so much to contribute to society. It’s mainly for her development and I just hope that other people also give their helpers the time and space to further develop themselves.”
