How to Make a Custom Dress Form

I dread hemming. To me, its the least fun part of a project, and it almost seems inevitable that I mess it up and it ends up crooked. I decided my life would be a million times easier if I only had a dress form. Well, after a search of the internet, I discovered you really can't find anything under $100, and those tend to be terrible (according to product reviews).

What to do... what to do...

Time to whip out the duct tape. Wait... What?!

Apparently, as a miracle material, you can make just about anything with duct tape, including dress forms. I'm not going to take credit for this. I did have very useful instructions that I found on the web. If you're interested you can find them here. Therefore I'll skip the step by step instruction and just give a brief run down.

http://www.threadsmagazine.com/item/16297/create-a-custom-dress-form

Couple a tips from someone who did this:

• Ideally you should really have two additional people help you. One to tape you and one to cut the tape. This uses A LOT of tape. So it can be a bit exhausting if there's only two of you.
• You can find the fun decorative duct tape in craft stores, but only use it for the outer layer. Do not buy the silver duct tape at craft stores, however. It's much much cheaper at Home Depot and you get a lot more.

In case your curious how it turned out, here's some progress pics:

Body armor!! At this point I really couldn't breath. Super sexy, I know...

Custom indeed! You can really see the body type differences between me and my friend. Can you tell who's taller? Clue, I ran out of pink polka dot tape (though in my defense, the roll was smaller).

I installed a hook in the ceiling and strung it from there. Not quite finished, but I wanted to test it. I'll talk about what the skirt belongs with at a later date. I'll just say it's for my NY Comic Con costume.

And finished! The waist was a little too big. So I cut some slits in the duct tape and pulled them together to make it smaller. All the other measurements were perfect!