2016 - Rainbow Dream

This year I was pumped and decided to go all out for my second trash fashion show. At this point I wasn't friends with the girl who got me into recycled fashion, but it didn't matter, I still had so much fun. I have sort of been obsessed with rainbows for most my life, and of course I made a dress that looked like a rainbow. I think this was the dress I struggled most to name actually. During the year leading up to the show, I collected tons of random things. I gathered bottle caps, Easter eggs, tissue paper, candy wrappers, juice packs, snack boxes, you name it! Anything that had color I would save. For the base I used my family's old clothes they gave me. I am the receiver of all the family's badly worn jeans and khakis (which is awesome by the way). Any little scraps I could find, I would stitch together to form a dress. This was the case for 3 years of recycled fashion I've done (2016-2018). Lately, I have been figuring out more useful ways to use up my pile of denim and khaki fabric.

I remember this dress taking forever to finish. I had to sew the base, including a long zipper which I have never done before. Then hot glue all the pieces on. Figuring out how big I wanted each section to be was also a bit challenging. Once I got to the back I ran out of most my materials, so I had to resort to colored napkins and larger pieces of colored cardboard. If you look closely, you can tell what some of my favorite candies were at the time! For my accessories I made a small floppy hat, raindrop earrings, and a sun necklace. The hat was held together by Duck Tape, glue, and thread. It also had a mini circular rainbow on top. I loved the necklace though, I used tissue paper and a yellow bottle cap. I was in middle school at the time, and every day I would drink an apple juice. I would save those bottle caps so I could use them on my dress, which definitely came in handy.

When I reached the finishing of the dress, I had a traumatizing experience with it. At my dad's house we had a wolf spider problem, they seriously were everywhere. I'm sure some can agree with me that they are scary creatures, they run super fast and can get pretty big! Of course I have a terrible fear of spiders too. So I would work on my dress at both my mom's and dad's house, bringing it back and forth every week. I guess after working on it at my dad's for a while, it had accumulated some spider friends. Fast forward a week or so and I was working on it in the living room of my mom's place. I was having a lot of fun too, but then a wolf spider comes out of no where running straight at me. I frantically tried to get away and tell my mom. I believe we lost that one but then sure enough, 10 minutes later another one comes out! At this point I'm crying and feeling super squeamish. We pick it up, shake it a few times then set it on the counter. Then, another one comes out of it! Now I'm just a wreck and we decide to hang it in the studio for a few days. After that I could barely touch the thing, but it was just about finished anyway. Thankfully there were no other wolf spiders in my dress after that. Maybe they just wanted to eat the leftover chocolate crumbs and then were mad at me for disturbing their home.

I have a habit of finishing things pretty early, so the dress was done at least a month before the show. I think it was a little more challenging for me this time because I didn't have a friend to freak out with behind stage. All I remember is finally getting to the catwalk and being super focused on walking. It was a bit hard to walk in the dress, and every time I stretched it, it would break a little bit. This was, unfortunately, a common theme with my early recycled dresses. I believe before I reached the stage I had someone help me zip my dress but the zipper broke. I got it figured out of course, but it was stressful. In the end I lost to a girl who used barely worn swim caps to make a dress. I got 2nd but I was still a little bummed. That same girl won the year prior with a dress made of playing cards (I'm pretty sure they were brand new too). It doesn't matter who won though, because I had a lot of fun, and was still teeming with ideas for my future dresses! Early the next year (the fashion shows are typically in November) I had the opportunity to display my dress at a booth during an Earth Day event at our local PEEC center. Sadly I couldn't make it to the event, but it was really cool to have my dress displayed in from of my town!