Haven't posted on here in quite a while - (Sorry!) But I've made a lot of new things in the past year, so I'll be happy to start sharing again! I made this dress from vinyl records that were donated from a local music store. This is the first time working with this material for me, so I would LOVE any additional suggestions for cutting it!
The first thing I did was take a stack of records that I thought worthy of cutting up with metal shears. I made a smaller circle template that would fit six cutouts from each large vinyl record, and marked them with a sharpie, and cut them out. *Note*...this was tedious and the plastic was very sharp on the edges, and some of the records were so old and brittle that they shattered when I tried to cut them.
For the top "corset" part, I took the circles and softened them with a heat gun before layering them into a torso shape, and melted them together. I used quite a bit of hot glue on the back to reinforce the joints, and attached a soft cup bra into the inside to keep it from irritating whomever is wearing it. I also used some pleather along the top and bottom edges, and for the strap and the sides where it laces together.
On the bottom skirt part, the circles are joined together with metal jump-rings that I formed from electric fence wire (I bought a spool of it at the local hardware store. I use this for a lot of things that require sturdy wire!). Using the jump rings, the skirt is able to move and act a bit more like fabric.
The blue underskirt is made from woven plastic that came from our neighbor's trampoline. They were throwing away the trampoline 'cause it got mangled in a windstorm, but the plastic was in good shape still.
There is a video (or two?) floating around of this being worn by my model...we had a big fashion show this past weekend where I live, so there are also lots of photos out there on Facebook now! I'll try to post a link to the video below, my part of the runway show starts at around the 3:47 mark .
http://youtu.be/oOb40zSTJm4OH YEAH ... and the silver necklace is made from pop tabs and silver plastic. I'll try to write a post about that one later on!
(PS: The second photo was taken by myself, and the first photo was taken by Andrew Kung.)
