Thursday, April 7, 2011

A Look Back: A few more dresses from Speakeasy 2.0


Molly is modeling the floor length blue dress with garbage bag flower accents. Kait is modeling the shorter purple ruched party dress.




Above is the detail on the back of Kait's dress. There is a braided chrome band around the outside. Both dresses use velcro closures.

A Look Back: Warped Tour 2009








I used Electric Blue duct tape and Chrome Duct tape. I hand cut all of the tiger stripes. This is probably one of my favorite dresses because I love animal print and Electric Blue duct tape.


Here one model is wearing it at the Ingenuity Cleveland Speakeasy 2.0

A Look Back: AP Tour 2009 The Fall Ball

In short, we won Best Dressed and got to go back stage for the show :-)



All of these letters were hand cut from duct tape.




My sister and I before the show

Sunday, February 20, 2011

A Look Back: Winter Formal 2008 (Saint Joesph's Academy)

This dress is made of Flamingo Pink duct tape, force flex trash bags, and a chrome strap. Also, my flowers are made of duct tape. This dress made a reappearance when shooting some photos with Robert Banks in the late summer of 2010. The following pictures were taken by Robert.
The "Once it hits your lips" dress and the winter formal dress
(As you can see, the strap is missing...it came off and I didn't have time to make another)



A Look Back: Winter Formal 2008 (Berea)


This is the dress I wore to 2008 Winter Formal. This dress has a lot of sentimental value because it was my first official "date" with my current boyfriend. The day I first met him, about 7 days before, I asked him to my dance and asked "Is it okay if I wear duct tape?" and he said yes to both. Little did he know what he was getting into with my duct tape addiction. I used Teal colored tape and created a white ruffle on the bottom with duct tape and the white hearts are also cut out of duct tape. Sometimes when I'm looking for consistency, I will use a die cut machine for scrapbooking. Other times, if it is a larger design, I will hand cut my details.

A Look Back: Winter Formal 2008 (St. Ignatius)


Since I just sent my little sister off on her own winter formal last night, I feel that it is appropriate to post one of my winter formal dresses. This dress was the 3rd winter formal I went to in 2008. I made it the day before the dance, as usual. I made a basic halter dress with a black waist band, and added black ruffles on the neckline and at the bottom. This dress was also worn in 2010 by the lovely Fiona at Fashion Week Cleveland at Ingenuity Fest.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

A Look Back: Family Force 5


I find it truly amazing what dancing and a mosh pit will do to a dress that seems indestructible. Anyone who knows me would tell you that I have an unhealthy love to dance like a maniac and mosh. While my moshing days are coming to a close after a few too many softball size bruises and passing out, my dancing days are far from over. 2009 was the year of Family Force 5. I could not get enough and I think I attended 4 of their shows within a year. This dress is one of my later dresses where I learned the beauty of garbage bags and had constructed this dress within the 24 hours before the show.

The dress is based off of Family Force 5's song "Rip it up" which you can listen to below:





The song itself is about essentially dancing crazy and "ripping up" and "tearing up" the dance floor so I thought why not make that literal and take a dance floor (like the one below) and rip it up.

I created a bunch of brightly colored squares of duct tape and pieced them together. On the top of the dress, I cut out with a craft blade the words "Rip It Up" with the "p" mimicking the lightning bolt in the logo. After the concert, I hung around to get it signed by the band. Promptly after having it signed, I covered the signatures with clear packaging tape to preserve them. As you can tell from the picture, I was dancing so much I looked pretty rough though being front row and dancing like crazy in that small club was one of the best concert experiences of my life. Now after 4 different FF5 outfits, they remembered me as "Duct Tape Girl" when I saw them at Cedar Point/.


Rip It Up Lyrics:
I saw you strut
Into the room
My heart started pumpin'
When you broke out them moves

Your heels dug in
Straight through the floor
You're a machine, baby
Seek and destroy

[Pre Chorus 1:]
She must be crazy
She's got that feeling
Look out now she's a psycho killer

[Chorus 1:]
The dance floor is shredded to pieces
The way you rip it up has got my heart rate increasin'
The dance floor is obliterated
The way you tear it up has got my soul liberated

[Chorus 2:]
Rip it up

Rip it up
Don't stop until it's torn up
Tear it up
Tear it up
It's just the fate of the dance floor

[Verse 2:]
She cuts a rug
Just like a razor
Then burns it down
Like an incinerator

She's a slayer
And it don't phase her
She's from the future
She's a terminator

[Pre Chorus 2:]
Just like a chainsaw
Her teeth cut in
Watch out now here she goes again