She Went Viral for Her Upcycled Disney Dresses. Then She Was Asked to Design a Piece for “Dancing with the Stars” (Exclusive)

NEED TO KNOW

• Kelsey Swarthout was asked by Dancing with the Stars contestant Danielle Fishel to create a Jungle Book-themed dress for her appearance on the show

• The designer, known on Instagram as “ropedropdesign,” walks PEOPLE through the two-week scramble to get the dress made in time for its prime time appearance

• Swarthout says she even got to visit while DWTS was filming, seeing Fishel wearing her custom piece in person

Kelsey Swarthout has created hundreds of dresses. Only one of them has appeared on prime-time television.

On the evening of Oct. 7, Swarthout hosted a few of her friends to watch the latest episode of ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, which honored Disneyland Resort’s 70th Celebration with a night full of Disney-themed performances. She was overjoyed when one of her handmade creations — a brightly colored dress sewn from a pair of Jungle Book-themed bedsheets — made its debut on the silver screen, worn by contestant and Boy Meets World actress Danielle Fishel.

“It was just so cool to see it on TV,” Swarthout tells PEOPLE. And some of her more than 300,000 Instagram followers, who tune in for her videos upcycling children’s bedsheets into custom clothing items, agreed.

“Almost the best part of everything was people who have followed me for a while or knew about my pieces were like, ‘I saw it and I immediately knew it was yours,’ ” she says. “To just be able to recognize it from seeing it on the show — that made me feel really good, too.”

Swarthout’s success has been years in the making.

Ever since she was a middle schooler, she’s had a love for sewing, first as a hobby. In college, she took up a slightly less crafty area of study, architecture, and started a job at an architectural firm after she graduated, but she never loved the work.

After Swarthout lost her job during the pandemic, she returned to sewing. She had a trip planned to Disneyland in Southern California — Disney is her second love after sewing — and happened to stumble across a vintage Mickey Mouse bedsheet on eBay. At the time, Swarthout had been hand-making Mickey Mouse ears, and she thought the sheet could be the perfect pattern for a new pair.

“I made the pair of ears, which were really small, and I had a ton of leftover fabric from that, so I thought that I should make a matching dress to go with the ears,” she says. When she shared the finished dress on her Instagram, her page started to blow up, and she hasn’t stopped making dresses since.

Today, she has her niche — what she describes as “bright, colorful, whimsical clothing for adults” — completely cornered. Swarthout’s Instagram page pops with the bold hues of Disney’s most iconic characters, which adorn custom-made dresses, bags, crewnecks and jackets made mostly from vintage children’s bedsheets and blankets.

On her account, she shares a combination of commissioned pieces — customers will mail in their childhood bedsheets for her to sew into a wearable item — and projects she creates for herself to maintain her love for the art.

Swarthout runs her account and business almost entirely by herself, sometimes spending the day “sewing from the moment I wake up to the time I go to sleep,” she laughs, and others filming and editing her content, answering emails or responding to customers’ messages.

So when she received an Instagram DM from Fishel requesting a custom dress for the DWTS Disney episode in the next two weeks, she wasn’t even sure she’d be able to finish the piece in time.

“I saw her message and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ because I knew Danielle from Boy Meets World, so I was really excited about that,” she says. “It was such a tight turnaround time, and I was about to go on a trip around the same time, so I didn’t even know if it would be able to happen — but just the fact that she thought of me and messaged me and wanted to include me in the process at all was just so sweet and genuine.”

The pair exchanged a few more messages: Fishel told Swarthout she had a dance planned to a song from Jungle Book and would love a dress to honor the 1967 classic film, sent over her measurements and picked out a few of Swarthout’s dress designs that she particularly liked. As soon as Swarthout got home from her trip, she started sewing.

“It got to her in time and she got to wear it on the show,” she says. “So everything worked out.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

After the dress was delivered, the creator got an invite that made the sweet opportunity even sweeter. Fishel asked if she wanted to stop by Disneyland on the day they were filming.

“I said, ‘Of course I would love to come visit you guys,’ ” she tells PEOPLE. “I got to see the whole filming setup, which was really cool. I’ve never done that or seen that at all.”

Fishel even asked Swarthout if she would want to appear in an interview with her and her dance partner Pasha Pashkov about the dress and the design process. But the most magical part was actually getting to see Fishel wear the piece in person.

“She just looked so good in it, first of all,” says Swarthout. “But a lot of times, once I ship my clothes off, I never see them again. Sometimes I’ll see them in photos or people will tag me in, of course, but I rarely ever get to see them being worn in person. So to see that — and then it’s on her. It was just such a special moment.”

Amid the craziness of designing Fishel’s on-camera wardrobe, Swarthout is also preparing to launch her first book Sew Nostalgic!, a guide to upcycling bedsheets with 12 unique patterns and step-by-step instructions. She started writing the book about a year and a half ago, a process she described as “so hard,” but is now finished and “excited for it” to be shared with the world.

And as she waits in anticipation for the book’s Feb. 24 release date, she plans to continue avidly watching this DWTS season (she tells PEOPLE she sobbed through Oct. 14’s emotional dedication night episode). And, of course, Swarthout encourages everyone to “vote for Danielle — because she’s the best.”

Read the original article on People