It's been a busy several months since my last post, so I have a lot of catching up to do here. Life has been chock full of good stuff, leaving me with lots of fun things to share...including some big changes for this blog. But before I get into that, let's chat about bubble wrap, shall we?
The pop-ularity of bubble wrap is undeniable. Every year, the Sealed Air Corporation makes enough bubble wrap to stretch from the earth to the moon and back. That’s more than 472,000 miles of plastic…enough to wrap around the earth 18 times. Does that blow your mind?
Now consider this... The Plastic Loose Fill Council states that 45 million pounds of loose fill (aka: packing peanuts) are produced each year. They are also proud to tell you that a whopping 30% of that is reused…leaving a mere 31.5 million pounds to be sent to landfills each year.
If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you may recall that earlier this year, I designed a wedding dress for the Seattle ReStore Trash Fashion Show. The dress was made entirely of post-consumer packaging waste...bubble wrap, packing peanuts, tyvek mailers, etc. The intent of my design was to playfully highlight the problem of excessive packaging and plastic pollution and to encourage people to buy local whenever possible. And, of course, I had to tie it back to weddings somehow!
I started my design process by looking for inspiration online. The images in this post are some of my favorites. Keeping in mind that I have never designed a dress, let alone one made from trash, I knew I wanted to keep my design relatively simple, but still wanted it to have a certain wow factor.
And then there were the shoes...I had to have great trash shoes, so I did some sole searching for those too...sorry, couldn't resist!
Accessories were also on my design radar...a headpiece, bracelet and trashy bridal bouquet became fun additions that added to the overall look and feel of my dress design.
If you are curious about how my bubble wrap wedding gown turned out or how the fashion show went, I hope you'll check back for part 2 of this post. Also to come...some great big changes for this blog. Follow along on BlogLovin' or subscribe to have fresh posts beamed directly to your inbox so you don't miss a thing!
Lead Photo: Designer Michael Michalsky designed this amazing collection of haute couture gowns for DHL. To see the rest of the collection click here.
