Dress made of 10,000 Starburst wrappers goes viral
Abbey Zelko
A Lancaster County woman is garnering national attention after photos of a dress she made out of 10,000 Starburst wrappers has gone viral.
Emily Seilhamer, 24, of Elizabethtown got the idea for the dress after her now-husband offered her a pack of Starbursts one day.
“That’s how me and my husband met,” she said. “That’s how he broke the ice, and we got to know each other.”
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Starbursts are his favorite candy, she said, and she noticed that he was always eating them. So, she asked him to start saving the wrappers for her.
Seilhamer is an artist and an upcycler, which means she recycles unwanted items and transforms them into new products or materials. She thought she would make a pair of shoes out of his Starburst wrappers. But he gave her so many – grocery bags full of them every week – that she decided to make a whole outfit.
She collected the wrappers from friends, family members and coworkers for four years.
“They kept discontinuing some of the colors I was using in the original design,” she said. “I had to redesign the dress two or three times to accommodate that.”
After a year of sewing all of the wrappers together, she finally finished the dress about three years ago right before her husband proposed.
Photos of the dress have since gone viral after Seilhamer recently posted them on social media.
The dress has been featured by news outlets across the country and was even the subject of a joke on the “Weekend Update” segment of “Saturday Night Live.”
“That was so funny,” she said “Just the fact that it went that far floors me.”
Seilhamer has also made dresses out of men’s neckties and kitchen wallpaper. And, she has a couple new projects in the works involving puzzle pieces.
“I’m out there to inspire people,” she said. “I hope something I do inspires them to create something themselves.”
Follow her on Facebook at @EmilySeilhamerArt to see more of her creations.
