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AMERICAN FORK — While most kids spend their spring break hiking and swimming, two juniors at American Fork High School spent almost 200 hours creating an intricate prom dress and tuxedo from Duck brand duct tape.
Rebekah Mecham, 17, said she got the idea to create the prom outfits in 2014 after learning about Duck’s Stuck at Prom Scholarship Contest, where students create prom outfits and accessories using Duck Tape. She decided she wanted to enter to win the $10,000 scholarship prize.
“My parents are super into trying to find me scholarships to pay for school and stuff,” Mecham said. “I’m currently in AP art and I love art. … I thought this would be a good opportunity to try and take my art skills to a new level and experiment and see what happens if I could earn some money for college.”
Mecham said she recruited her friend and fellow AP art student, Wyatt Burns. Burns said when she first approached him with the idea, he was skeptical.
“Well at first, I was kind of like, ‘What do you mean? How is that possible?’” Burns said. “At first, I was not very into it.”
However, Burns said he liked the idea of winning $10,000 for college so he decided to join in the project. In January, the two teens began making plans and Mecham began planning designs and picking colors for the prom outfits and accessories.
“I decided that I really love the lace look and kind of the 50s-era lace top,” Mecham said. “I had doodled a lot of vine designs and little flower designs in my sketchbook so we tried to take that design and cut out lace using duct tape.”
Rebekah Mecham
Mecham said parts of the outfits were created using fabric and laying duct tape on top of it. They tried cutting the decorative lace pieces out of duct tape with an X-Acto knife, but the tape kept breaking, so they created the details from paper and then covered the paper with duct tape. Mecham said it also proved difficult sewing the separate pieces together because the sewing needle kept getting stuck in the tape. Eventually, they just taped all the different parts of the outfits together.
“(We used) spray adhesive, hot glue or anything,” Mecham said. “We finally got it to stick. At a point, we even got clear nail polish and we were painting over the dress to try and make it stick.”
The teens finished their outfits just in time for the American Fork High School prom on April 25. Mecham said they only wore the outfits for part of the dance because they were so hard to move in.
“I had to have someone help me into it just to get it on,” she said. “It was super sticky and like you’d sweat a lot in it. I kind of felt like a Barbie doll because I wasn’t able to move my arms up. You had to keep a really stiff Barbie posture so it was not very comfortable at all.”
However, their work paid off and Mecham and Burns were named one of the top 10 finalists in the competition. The contest runs until July 8 and the winner is selected by popular vote. If they win, each teen will receive $10,000 and American Fork High School will be awarded $5,000. Mecham said they want to make their school proud.
“We really want to get people from Utah into this and make our school proud,” she said, “and show what you can do with art.”
People can vote once a day.
Rebekah Mecham
