Make it work!

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A group of workers from the medical consulting company Healthgrades are working after hours in an unused area of beige cubicles. They are finishing up work on a skirt that features rings made out of tissue paper in shades of yellow, blue, purple and pink

Hung on a dress form, the skirt provides a welcome pop of color on a gray Monday afternoon in January.

Two of the team’s members, Emily Leas and Kara Burkhalter, admit they’re a little bit out of their element.

“We don’t normally do anything like this.” Burkhalter says. “We work with data!” Leas adds, laughing.

The group is competing in what fans of the competitive design show Project Runway would know as an “unconventional challenge.” They must design an outfit out of paper products, which will be modeled at the READ(y) to Wear event on Feb. 10 at the Madison Concourse Hotel, in a benefit for the Madison Reading Project.

Today, the Healthgrades team is having what Project Runway mentor Tim Gunn would call a “make it work moment.”

“We lost a couple of people from the creative department in the past two weeks unexpectedly,” says Burkhalter, the team’s leader. So Burkhalter recruited a couple of other employees, including Leas, to help out.

The team’s inspiration for the outfit is the cover illustration to Dr. Seuss’ Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

Ten teams are competing in this year’s READ(y) to Wear event. The clothing, aside from the undergarments, must be made entirely from paper products. The Healthgrades team has been busy making tissue paper poms-poms to build their high-volume skirt.

Several team members take turns sitting on the floor using — and burning themselves on — a hot glue gun to adhere the pom-poms to a purchased A-line underskirt slip. Burkhalter says they learned how to make the pom-poms from a YouTube video.

Burkhalter also recruited Gloria Huete, who works in the call center, to the team. She stepped in and started making many of the tissue paper balls between calls.

Rowan Childs is the founder and director of the Madison Reading Project, a nonprofit organization that provides quality books and programming for children in the Madison area.

“I never thought I would be organizing a fashion show,” Childs says. But Childs, a fan of Project Runway, realized a runway show featuring outfits made out of paper could be a unique fundraiser. Last year’s inaugural READ(y) to Wear event was a success, selling out five days before the show. “It ended up being so fun,” Childs says. “We had 13 teams and all of the pieces were so unique.”

Corin Frost and Vicky Franchino, another team in the competition, are working on an outfit inspired by the Russian fairytale “Baba Yaga.” Franchino, a freelance writer and copywriter, says she and Frost pulled ideas from the book Magical Tales from Many Lands and both women gravitated toward the Slavic story about a witch. In addition to modeling the outfit, Franchino is creating the skirt using paper that she designed with her husband to look like birch bark. Although she has some sewing experience, Franchino says the first time she tried to construct the skirt the paper ripped immediately. “Working with paper is a whole different beast,” she says.

At Healthgrades, the skirt is almost complete when the team takes a step back to throw around ideas about the outfit’s top. Huete suggests something made out of paper plates or coffee filters while Burkhalter starts folding tissue paper into something resembling a tube top. Calling it a day, they decide to try to create something out of card stock tomorrow. Given the team’s resourcefulness, there is no doubt they will make it work.

READ(y) to Wear Event: Feb. 10, 7-10 p.m., Madison Concourse Hotel, 1 W. Dayton St.

Books given away by Madison Reading Project in 2016: 10,000

Books given away in 2017: more than 25,000

Number of tissue paper pom-poms in the Healthgrades team’s A-line skirt: 125

Items used to create outfits in Project Runway’s unconventional challenges: licorice, sombreros, newspapers, car parts, bird seed