Taegan McMahon still wears her father’s first pair of pajamas, the ones with little white whales on them.

Not literally, but McMahon sees the red, white and blue fabric as alternative material. She would never throw the perfectly good fiber away, even if it didn’t hold family memories.

McMahon’s goal in life is to help protect poison dart frogs from the effects of acid rain. By sewing with recycled materials, she believes she can help. The patch-quilt skirt she made with her father’s pajamas and a friend’s doll clothes is testament to McMahon’s commitment to helping the planet. Her shirt is made from an old pillowcase.

McMahon sat on her mother’s lap and learned to sew when she was 3 years old. Around that time, she would save earthworms from the sun by putting them in her pocket. “Animals were a really important thing to me.”

McMahon, 21, is a biology major at Bates College in Lewiston. She has a loom and boxes of recycled plastic bags in her room at the “folk house.” The Olin Arts Center on campus offered McMahon a Green Horizons grant for her sustainable clothing project, a body of work made from used plastic bags: grocery bags, shopping bags and the blue newspaper bags that friends send to her in the mail.

It takes six hours to braid and weave three yards of material, enough to make a jacket, she said. Because the process is labor intensive, clothes are not being mass-produced using her methods. But McMahon does have hope. “Four or five years ago, people thought this was crazy,” she said. “But now alternative materials are trendy.” Some manufacturers are using recycled plastic bottles to make fleece, a popular material used in high-performance outdoor clothing.

Other recycled materials she plans to add to her wardrobe: beer bottle caps from Applebee’s in Auburn, cider cans from her trip to England and hair from her two Bernese mountain dogs, Seneca and Maxine.

McMahon’s fashion sense can be witnessed during the Green Horizons exhibit at the Bates College Museum of Art beginning in June.