66Sick <3s Chictopia DIY Porcelain Flower Dress

Nicollette, myself, and Christina after two weeks of outfit prep!

This Friday night, we celebrated the opening of Fashion Week with our favorite editors from Chictopia.com, including Helen, Connie, and Camille, who are all just as charming in real life as they are on their respective blogs.  For the occasion we decided to dress in the super-femme, flower-bomb style that isn't so much representative of the users of the site, but is evocative of what we think of when hear the word Chictopia.  I've always wanted to do a Martin Margiela or Viktor & Rolf style flower-covered dress, and when I told Christina the idea, she said that she thought it sounded cool, but that she would want to paint all the flowers until they looked like they were made out of ceramic and porcelain.   We decided to top off the look by remaking a bird headpiece that we made for one of our first 66Sick outfits two years ago.  We really had no idea how it would turn out when we started, but we both had a pretty clear vision of what we wanted the end result to look like, and figured out how to get there along the way.  Here's how we did it.

What you need:

5 bundles of white silk roses

1 bundle of white silk hydrangeas

3-4 bundles of small silk daisies

1/2 a bucket of white latex paint

1 yard of heavy white jersey + elastic waistband for skirt (or you can buy a premade skirt)

1 glue gun + tons of gluesticks

1 white unitard

handneedles

white thread

1. Disassemble the flowers from the bouquet and dip them individually into the latex paint, making sure that every petal is thoroughly covered, including the back of the petals.

2. Find a nice ledge and use it to hang the flowers up with masking tape to dry.  Make sure to put a drop cloth underneath---we actually used an old pizza box, which is pretty gross, but does the trick!

3. Let the flowers dry completely (2-3 hours) before taking them down, since they will be very wet and dripping a lot.  If you would like to speed up the drying process, you can use a hair dryer.  After they were finished, we removed all the stems and leaves.  Christina also went over them one more time with a can of white spray paint, but only because we're really anal retentive.

4. After the flowers were completely dry, we glued each of them onto a double layered jersey skirt that Christina made.  We tried to make it as clustered looking as possible, and filled all of the holes with the small daisies.  I thought this process was going to go really fast, but it was actually quite time consuming to glue each petal, since we wanted to make sure that none of the flowers would fall off.  Luckily hot glue fuses to jersey incredibly well, and we didn't lose a single flower all night!!!

5. The end result!  We saved a rose and a hydrangea, and hand sewed them onto the straps of the American Apparel white unitards that we bought to finish the look.

How we made the bird headband:
1. Using a fake dove we picked up in the district for $1.50, we tore the bird apart using an exacto knife.  I removed one of the wings, pulled out the tail feathers and then cut off 2/3 of the bird body off.  

2. I cut down the wing I tore off about an inch before gluing it onto the headband.

3. I glued the remaining bird body on top of the wing, and glued the tail feathers onto the side of the headband.  We tried to shape the wings a little to create more movement and dynamism, and the effect of a bird in flight.

-Tiffany