Teacosy: Man Made Mannequins

Hello my pretties!!

Welcome back!!
I hope life is treating you well wherever you are! Life has been a bit crazy over in our cozy little corner of the world! We are getting ready to go over to the beautiful Rarotonga for a week to celebrate the marriage two of our very best friends! Very exciting!! So it is going to be a week of sunshine, smiles, scooters, snorkels and I do's! So stay tuned and I am sure I will have so exciting pictures to share when we come back home!

So I have been attempting to make some of my own clothes and I decided that it was a good idea to make my own dress form because the store brought ones are so expensive!! So I jumped on Google and decided to try and see if it was possible to make my own! Turns out it wasn't going to be as complicated as I thought! All you need to do is a few easily accessible items and a trusted person!
The things that you need are:

A few rolls of duct tape (depending on your body size will depend on how much tape you will need we brought three rolls but only ended up using two rolls. I am a size 6-8)
Scissors
old clothes you don't mind cutting and never using again (make sure these clothes fit well so there is no bunching) I used a pair of old bike shorts that I had managed to somehow melt a candle on! grr! and a long sleeve T-shirt. You can wear a bra if you want but I didn't as I figured I could always but a bra on the dress form if I needed to :)
something to stuff your form with! I used plastic bags because we had millions of them! They worked really well but you could use news paper of even poly-fill.

coat hanger.

I would also encourage you to go to the toilet before hand!! you are going to be taped up and unable to do anything until you get cut out of it!

So to get started put on your old clothes! excuse the pose it wasn't really a warm night...
Josh (my better half) pointed out that the neckline on the shirt was quite scooped so I ended up putting an old polo on to of the T-shirt and tucking it in as well I would recommend against this because as you can see in the pictures below it bunches and adds quite a bit of bulk so your form will end up being a bit bigger than what you really are! But I was cold and not so keen to take away the extra warmth haha!
Now the fun part begins! The taping!!

SEE WHAT I MEAN ABOUT THE WEIRD BUNCHING?? I have some odd pot belly thing going on ahahahaha!! Anyway so the best way to go about it is to make a cross between your breasts and then wrap around your hips. Start wrapping around your waist and move towards your legs and crotch (this is why you are going to need a trusted person it is a fairly intimate place to be working around haha. Josh thought it was pretty funny)

So now you are starting to look like some weird dominatrix character or some very horrid fetish...
You will now be moving on to the arms and movement becomes very restricted I tried walking around and moving and for the first time in my life I had the robot down pact! ;) make sure who ever is doing the wrapping doesn't go to tight on your chest!

Next step is the breasts! Josh started by making an "X" over each breast and then taping over very lightly as to not distort the shape of your breasts. By this point you will be looking ridiculous but that's perfectly OK because you are so close to being finished!!

Now you will very carefully need to be cut out of this! We started at the neck and cut down to the opposite sides leg, once you have cut all the way open you will need to very carefully wiggle out of the old clothes being careful not to squish or distort anything!
Once your are out you will put the coat hanger into the shoulders and have the top coming out of the neck.
You will now tape up the places you had cut open! Again being careful not to alter the shape to much!

So as you can see I squished the torso and legs a bit but I managed to fix it by putting extra stuffing in those parts.
To stuff I taped up the opening of the arms and legs and stuffed through the neck but you can do it however works for you. You may find to help you stuff it tightly you will need a stick of some sort to back down your filling (I used a wooden spoon) I found I had a hard time stuffing the bottom of it so I cut a small hole in the lower back and stuffed through the hole until it was nice and firm and simply taped closed the hole. once your form is nice and stuffed and resembling your body and you are happy with the result tape up the neck and you are done!! Sorry for not getting any photos of this part of the process but if you have any questions or a bit unsure of this process feel free to comment below :)

It looks pretty creep actually but it works a treat! after a few days I decide the black taped form was just a bit to creepy so I actually paper mache'd it and spray painted it. I also found that by doing that the form was a lot more solid and also more visually appealing sort of except i accidentally squished one of the breasts woops ...

So it is pretty ugly really but it does the job! and that is that!!

Another wee little project I did one sunny afternoon was revamping an old desk I brought for $5 off gumtree!
I needed a project desk because the dining table doesn't always cut it!
So I sanded back the desk and gave it a lick of paint nailed an old measuring tape to the top and now its a thing of beauty!