Soda Can Skirt

Ever see Bravo's Project Runway? Where they send designers into grocery stores and they have do design an outfit out of the raw materials in the store? I found that this was my perfect opportunity to have fun with an ordinary everyday material and make it into art. 

I had originally thought I was going to do a tree branch with leaves. After starting to play with the cans and thinking about where I wanted to put the branch on campus, I decided I wanted to do something that would catch more people's attention. What captures people's attention? Clothes! 

After deciding on making a skirt, I needed to figure out how to cut the cans. The middle section of the can made the most sense because I was able to flatten and cut the can into square pieces. While cutting up the cans I kept all the pieces of the cans, just incase I wanted to use them later. Once I had pile of square tin pieces cut up I needed to figure out how to attach them together. If I used small enough wire, I could sew the pieces together like fabric and thread. 

The next step was to figure out how it was going to wrap around the body. I used a thick piece of wire and folded a square tin piece around it, then sewed it in place with wire. 

I assembled the entire flat piece/patch work piece before I attached it to the top wire. Once I attached the two piece together, I decided it needed something more. This was when I added the belt. The belt is made from the bottom pieced of the can. They were sewed on the same way as the other pieces. 

The final part of the project was to convince on of my friends to be my model and to fit the skirt to their body. My friend Julia offered to be my model. Lucky for me it turned out that the skirt was pretty flexible in size. I was able to put all the extra can patch work underneath the top piece of the skirt. The skirt turned out to be a wrap skirt. I knew from the beginning that this skirt was not going to be a functional skirt but rather a piece of art or a statement. 

I really enjoyed working with this material because I found that it was quite malleable. At first I thought it was going to be extremely difficult but after cutting up a few cans it turned out to be quite easy. Although assembling the main panel of the skirt took a while, once I got the hang of sewing the piece together it didn't seem to take very long at all.