The Melted Glue Dress: How To Make

It's become quite apparent that I have a habit of choosing rather unusual and impractical materials to create my work from. What happened to the good old fashioned needle and thread?!?! Nope, that's clearly far too average for my liking. Once I get an idea in my head of what I want to make, it's hard for me to let go of that idea, even if it seems near impossible for me to actually make it.

When I was younger, I remember my grandma having a cupboard full of arts and craft things to keep me, my brother and my cousins entertained whilst we were at hers. One of my favourite things to do was melt different coloured candles over a large, plain candle to give it a fancy looking dripped wax effect. Of course, my grandma would watch over us like a hawk to make sure we didn't burn ourselves, or burn down the house for that matter. I was thinking back to the times when I could literally spend hours watching the wax dripping, and how I was completely mesmerised by how beautiful the candle would look afterwards. This inspired me to create a melted candle dress, and once the image of what it would look like was in my head, I couldn't let it go.

As much as I would have liked to go back to melting candles all day, wax is so delicate that it would be impossible to have anyone wear the dress without it all crumbling and breaking away. I decided to go on a mission to find a material that would give me a similar effect but be more durable and flexible so it would be slightly easier to wear. I should probably mention, I have this tendency to work on the aesthetics of my fashion pieces, rather than the wearability of them. I'll work on that, don't worry.  I decided to use hot glue as my choice of material, as I realised this would give me a similar effect when used in a dripping motion and, as it is essentially plastic, it would have a lot more durability. Half way through making this dress, I did decide I wanted to incorporate a fabric element into it, so I created the top half out of fabric and used the hot glue to drip down the shoulders, making it fit in with the skirt made completely out of glue.

I recorded the whole process of making this dress to put on YouTube, so I will leave that video at the bottom of this post so you can go and watch that. As much as I love how the video turned out, I could only use little clips to show each part of the process otherwise the video would have been ridiculously long, so I'm going to explain on here how I created it and what I did in each stage to give you a better understanding of how I actually made it.

Step One: 

First of all, I needed to create the shape of the skirt so that when I used the hot glue, it would have something to form around and mould against. I used paper to create the shape I wanted, and then used mod-rock over the paper to make it hard and give it more stability. Mod-rock is a form of plaster so this was definitely the messiest stage of the whole process. Ideally I would have done four layers of mod-rock to make it thicker, making some of the next stages a whole lot easier, however I ended up running out of mod-rock after only doing two layers and I was far too impatient to wait for more to be delivered, so I managed with doing just two layers. 

Step Two:

Once the plaster was completely dry, I then cut away any unwanted pieces of paper you could see, and also cut down the middle at the back so that I could take it off the mannequin. I then covered the whole skirt shape with hot glue, making sure to cover it in lines going downwards so I could eventually create the dripping effect. I found that covering the whole skirt with glue was so much easier when not on the mannequin, and it was important that I covered every little part of the skirt mould so that it would all hold together properly when taken off.

Step Three:

After covering the whole of the plaster mould skirt with the glue, I then decided to remove the glue from the mould so the skirt would be made entirely out of the glue. I did this by simply peeling the glue away from mould. I say 'simply', however this stage was far from simple. Like I said in step one, this stage would have been a lot easier if I had done more layers of the mod-rock to make the mould thicker. Because the mould was quite thin, it made it difficult to peel away from the glue, and in the end I had to soak parts of the plaster with water to make it easier to peel away. I eventually managed to separate the glue from the mould and was left with just the shape of a skirt made out of glue. 

Step Four:

Although I hadn't decided at this point how I wanted to connect the skirt at the back, I fastened it together with some thread for the time being so I could work with it on the mannequin during these next stages. I knew I wanted to create a dripping wax effect with the skirt, so I used the glue gun to drip glue from the bottom of the skirt. I had to do quite a few layers of dripping the glue to make it thicker and not so delicate so it wouldn't break off. During this stage, I actually ended up running out of the clear glue sticks I was using, so whilst I was waiting for my next order of them to arrive, I used some black glue sticks I had instead. This didn't make a difference as I had always planned on making the dress black anyway. 

Step Five:

Once I had finished dripping the glue to get the effect I was happy with, I used a black spray paint and covered the whole skirt black. I then used a gold spray paint and sprayed from the bottom upwards to create a golden ombre effect on the bottom of the skirt. The spray paint worked really well at creating the effect I wanted as I could make the colours fade into each other, meaning the transition from the black to gold wasn't too harsh. 

Step Six:

To finish off the skirt, I decided to add a fabric lining to the top half of the skirt, purely to make it more comfortable to wear. To do this, I cut panels of fabric and glued them using the hot glue gun to the inside, making sure I didn't go too far down as I didn't want the fabric to be visible. By this point I'd decided that I wanted to use buttons to connect the skirt together at the back. I did this by gluing elastic hoops to one side and then gluing buttons to the other. I had to use glue rather than thread due to the actual skirt being made out of glue, as it would be too difficult to get the needle and thread through the glue. 

Step Seven:

Once the skirt had been finished, it was then time to move on to the top part of the dress. I decided that I did want to include a fabric element to this dress to create contrast within the materials used. I'm not too sure how to explain how I created the top because it was very much trial and error. I knew what kind of shape I wanted and I had a rough idea on how I would put it all together, so I got my little sewing machine out and started sewing. Some of this was made using the sewing machine and some of it was sewn by hand. 

Step Eight:

When I put the top part and the skirt together on the mannequin, I knew I needed to bring in a glue element to the top to bring it all together. I decided to use the glue gun to drip the glue down the shoulders to create the dripping effect on the top as well as on the skirt. I started from the top of the shoulder and dripped the glue down the front and the back until I had the look I wanted. 

Step Nine:

From experimenting with the glue,  I knew that I would be able to peel the glue away from the fabric so that I could take them completely off. Once I had peeled them off, I decided to spray the glue the same colours I had done the skirt, making sure to give them the same golden ombre effect, and when the paint had dried I then placed the glue back onto the dress and secured them in place. 

Step Ten:

Now that I had completed both the top half and the bottom half of the dress and was completely happy with the way it looked, my final step was to take it off the mannequin and strut around wearing it, to prove to everybody who didn't think it would work, that it is in fact possible to wear a dress made out of glue. 

I'm now on a mission to find more strange materials to use so that I can get back into my mini studio, also know as the garage, and start working on my mannequin again.

Becca x