What can you DIY with wallpaper from Spoonflower? A large mural? Check. Vase covers? Another check. What about a completely wearable wallpaper dress? Surprise… check!
We invited Olivia Mears, aka AvantGeek, an experienced artist, cosplayer and costume designer specializing in outside-of-the-box and unconventional materials, to construct an impressive dress with our popular Peel and Stick Wallpaper. Stick around to read about her process from design to final result.
Olivia: I’ve been making costumes for about eight years and I have always loved figuring out how to incorporate unconventional materials. It’s a fun challenge to mold and bend materials into wearable shapes and just see what sticks. In this case: Spoonflower’s Peel and Stick wallpaper!
Planning and Designing
For this wallpaper dress project, I started out by browsing designs on Spoonflower and sketching dresses of the patterns and colors that caught my eye. Ultimately, the fourth sketch pictured below was the winner, featuring Butterflies and Hibiscus Flowers by micklyn and Victorian Blue Gold Damask by nouveau_design.
Constructing the Top and Skirt
Using a plain roll of paper and masking tape, I patterned out a top and skirt that would become the base of the dress. I traced the top’s pattern onto the wallpaper before taping it back together and reinforcing the inside with packing tape. Then, I cut out the traced wallpaper pieces, peeled off their paper backing and stuck them directly to the paper top.
For the skirt, I cut out large fan-shaped pieces of wallpaper and folded them back and forth accordion style which allows the finished dress to be even more fan-shaped. I cut small vertical snips into the top (the narrowest part) to help evenly lay across the paper skirt before peeling and sticking it on (starting from the bottom up). It was a lot of trial and error reapplying these pieces to get the effect of draped fabric, but eventually it started to look right!
Once the skirt was finished, I moved on to the gold trim using the damask wallpaper, starting with diamond shaped cutouts and eventually trimming those down to a smaller variety of shapes.
The sleeves were similarly made, peeling the back only where it’d stick to the dress. Then the last detail was a blue paper trim that helped cover the underside of the exposed wallpaper.
The Final Look
As for wearing it: since the inside of the top is reinforced with packing tape, you could hole punch it and lace it up with string or ribbon—but for now I just used the tape to reattach the bodice and close the skirt. It’s surprisingly comfortable to wear… aside from trying to fit through doorways!
I also covered a foam partition in matching wallpaper and I love the optical illusion of standing in front of it. In total, for the dress I used three rolls of Butterflies and Hibiscus Flowers, plus one roll on the partition, and half a roll of Victorian Blue Gold Damask.
