
Yellowknife fashion designer Cheryl Fennell had planned for weeks how to transport her delicate birch bark dress to Vancouver for Indigenous Fashion Week. Air Canada had promised to hang the dress in the plane's business class section. But when that flight was canceled and she was rebooked on Canadian North, there was nowhere to hang her dress. Then the pilot hung it in his closet. On landing in Edmonton, Cheryl had to go through security again, but the dress wouldn't fit in the scanner. It took two months to make the dress, which is made of about 150 individual birch bark squares sewn together with sinew, using an awl to poke holes in the bark and sewing each piece individually by hand.
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