In late 2019, a challenge was started by Lynn Brannelly & another woman from Sewing Bloggers; the challenge was to create a garment from scratch using unconventional materials. It definitely felt like a Project Runway moment! Every week we had to post an update on what had changed from the previous week & give updates. We were allowed to use muslin & only one closure.

I thought about what I was going to make for awhile, but I knew for sure that I wanted to incorporate my culture with whatever my final decision would be. So I decided I would make a dress out of Christmas ornaments! What was I thinking…..

The first week we posted about what supplies we were going to use. It was extremely hard to find all yellow ornaments; I even took to Amazon & found some, but for the number I would need it was completely out of my budget. I decided I would spray paint them instead.

So first I started making the muslin for the dress. It was basically a ball gown, with Filipino traditional sleeves.

Next, but the longest part was breaking the ornaments up & hot gluing them to the dress. My hands hurt SO bad doing this, especially burning myself over & over again. This took SO much time it was unreal.

This is my sweet sis, Celena, who came to the rescue to help me with this entire monster. I’m not kidding when I said it took forever. I was starting to run out of time & I had to start to improvise. We decided for the white we would use beads.

The beads worked perfectly! My favorite part was when I was all done & I was at the photoshoot. The GOAT, Erica Clayton took these gorgeous pictures, @through_her_lens, she is absolutely amazing! The dress was so heavy & I felt so bad, because the beads were coming off…. needless to say, I had a mess to clean up.

The most important part of this story was…. I won. ❤

Congratulations to all the runners up & all of the other people that participated; there was SO many amazing creations!