Winchester Woman Wins State-Level NEXTILE Soy in Textiles Design Challenge
Leland Gilkison is a sophomore interior design student at University of Kentucky
The Kentucky Soybean Board is pleased to announce the winner from school and state-level NEXTILE: The Soy in Textiles Design Challenge – Leland Gilkison of Winchester. Leland is a sophomore interior design student at the University of Kentucky who made a dyed silk scarf decorated with a soy motif made from soy products. She is the daughter of Serena and Brennan Gilkison, and grew up on a farm in Clark County where her family raises soybeans, corn, beef cattle, tobacco, and black raspberries. (photo Kentucky Soybean Board)
PRINCETON, Ky. — The Kentucky Soybean Board is pleased to announce the winner from school and state-level NEXTILE: The Soy in Textiles Design Challenge – Leland Gilkison of Winchester. Leland is a sophomore interior design student at the University of Kentucky who made a dyed silk scarf decorated with a soy motif made from soy products. She is the daughter of Serena and Brennan Gilkison, and grew up on a farm in Clark County where her family raises soybeans, corn, beef cattle, tobacco, and black raspberries.
In NEXTILE’s second year of its competition, design students from 21 colleges and universities were invited to leverage their creative and problem-solving skills to produce the next sustainable innovation in textile design. The catch? Students must create their products using one versatile ingredient — soybeans.
Each participating individual or team received a design kit including six sustainable, soy-based materials including: soy silk, soy cashmere, organic pigment, soy wax and other soy products. Project submissions leveraged three or more of these ingredients to produce new textile threads, dyes, paints, designs and more. Judges included representatives from the design and textile industries, and soy farmers from around the country.
“It’s incredible how these talented students use their creativity and technical skill to create new uses for our soybeans,” said Brent Gatton, a Kentucky soybean farmer who serves on the United Soybean Board. “Their designs are impressive. And their commitment to developing sustainable solutions using soy is impressive. I’m excited for the future of each competitor who participated and for the future of soy.”
The winner from each school receives a $500 prize. In addition, the school-level winner is invited to participate in the national level competition.
“I was excited to hear about this challenge as it connects my interest/major of interior design to what I have been surrounded by my whole life: farming,” Leland said. “My dad, a soybean farmer, works extremely hard to provide my family and me the life we have, which I am forever grateful for. Although me participating in this challenge is small in the grand scheme of things, I believe by spreading word on soy and all it can do is still a step forward to the growing future that it holds. Having the opportunity to learn about these textiles and the materials within them helps me to better understand how to incorporate them into my designs.”
Leland said that her inspiration was, of course, soybeans, so she created stencils for the base pattern, mixed soy milk with the pigments for a paint-like application, stitched the x for a pop of color, added beeswax to the soy wax for molding ease and smoothing, and glued the wax with a water-based glue.
U.S. Soy has long been a critical ingredient for product innovation, going all the way back to Henry Ford, who used soy-based paints, textile materials and plastics for automobile design. Soy is used in every industry. Farmers can find their products in the streets they drive on, the shoes they wear and the biofuels for their vehicles. The possibilities are endless. There are more than 1,000 soy-based products currently on the market — from tires and firefighting foam to fabrics and turf. You name an industry, and U.S. Soy is almost always an essential component.
U.S. soybean farmers and industry partners consistently push the limits of innovation to discover and deliver solutions to the most significant challenges our world faces, such as food security and climate change. NEXTILE was created to put sustainable soy materials into the hands of the brightest young minds in design to create the next generation of eco-friendly and biobased textile solutions.
Learn more about NEXTILE, the participating schools and students, and the next round of soy-based sustainable innovation at ussoy.org/nextile.