Dress It or Wear It Challenge with Shel and Peg

A big hello from Peg and Shel. Today we are excited to share how we each met the Dress It or Wear It Challenge from StencilGirl®️. There are so many ways this challenge could be interpreted and it is always fun to see what everyone does. 

Peg found a cute wire dress form at the secondhand shop. When she started thinking of ways to recycle it, she wanted it to serve a purpose in her studio. Now this wouldn’t have to be a dress form but the form did fit the challenge. Using some clothes pins from the dollar store, and some spray paints to transform them, the pins became the foundation for the skirt. 

Shel took a different approach to the collaborative challenge to ‘dress up’ decorative dress-forms.

She did not have a wire form like Peg’s so instead she made her own from materials you would

normally toss in the trash. A soap bottle, a paper tube and a tissue box.  She glued these together

and then added some paper clay to the front of the bottle to make it more lady like. Then covered the

whole construction in paper mache with tissue. The top layer of tissue is from a dress pattern which

seemed appropriate. 

Shel’s next step in making this dress form project fabulous was to create some custom fabrics with

stencils and fabric paints. Shel used the agreed upon stencils and some pre-washed cotton muslin

fabric. She plans to make this dress form decoration a fun seasonal project for each holiday, so she

chose colors of Decoart So Soft Fabric paints that reminded her of Halloween and then went crazy

with pattern and color!

This crazy fun stenciled fabric was then cut into pattern pieces and sewn together to ‘dress up’ the dress-form with a cute little witchy dress. Shel also created a pointy hat accessory with some
stenciled black cardstock paper to finish up the look. So cute!

To finish off the dress-form Peg used Liquitex spray paints applied to all the surfaces of the pins through stencils. This month, Shel and Peg had chosen to use Klimt Forest Stencil by Cathy Taylor (L358), ATC Mixup 1 Stencil by Mary Beth Shaw (L543), and Ancient Marks Stencil by Suzi Dennis (L435).

Earlier, Peg had prepared some fabric for this project while collaborating with Shel on a live printing session aired on their Art Joy of Sharing YouTube channel. Some of the fabric was torn and woven into the wire on the dress form. More stenciled fabric was glued to the bodice before applying sari ribbon and trim.

So now when Peg needs to clip up a wet piece of paper or fabric, she will know right where to find her pins.

Wouldn’t it be fun to make a batch of these decorative clothes pins for your friends? I think she may have plans to make some more. Thanks for stopping by and giving us love. Peg and Shel