I’ve worked on this project a LOT this week. I realized pretty quickly that most of it is not hard but is very time-intensive.
I melted a lottt of plastic bottles (will still need to do more) and spent countless hours marking, cutting, and gluing pieces together. I definitely learned tips and tricks on how to work with the materials. For example, the hot glue dries much faster than normal hot glue, so I have to do big joining sections in parts. Additionally, while the pieces of plastic are pretty small, where I can use one sheet to cover multiple pieces of the pattern, it’s much faster and cleaner to just glue on a line of separation without actually cutting them and gluing them together.
I also spent some time coloring(my favorite part) and have had a lot of fun playing with mixing colors. It feels like a big coloring book.
Here’s the piece so far:
I think I might have to make the panels shorter than imagined, just because of how much time it takes. I purposely did the top half of the panels in case. Hopefully I can get at least 2/3 length of heat I wanted initially. Just cutting, gluing, and coloring, I managed to watch a season and a half of a show this week, so that’s fun.
Your panels are coming out really stunning. I am looking forward to seeing the next update.
For the top where you plan to add the ribbon, you can attach some Velcro on the backside to make it easy to attach/ detach to the skirt. They make them in all sorts of colors, and you might be able to use tape to attach it to the skirt in a way that does not permanently alter it.
Your piece is coming together very nicely. If you hadn’t told us that it was made out of recycle bottles, I would have never been able to guess. What you’ve been able to achieve is very impressive and I’m looking forward to seeing the final product.
Your panels are awesome, I specifically like how they look like a flexible version of stained glass! I think for aesthetic reasons, you might want to choose a theme / storyline for your dress. Your panels look awesome, but I think it would be even cooler if the dress could tell a story through it’s art.