Made for the annual Recycled Art show at the local recycling center, CartM http://cartm.org

Just found out that I made it into the Portland, OR Junk to Funk Recycled Fashion show, and am hyper-excited. http://junktofunk.org/

This is a crochet-ed dress I made out of my cherished soviet youth mixed tapes. There is definitely more hours of work in these then anyone could imagine, and I don’t mean construction, I mean the tapes.

Since there was virtually no western music allowed when I was a kid, none on the radio, none on TV, MOST DEFINITELY none to buy we got our fix from copies of copies of copies. When I was 14, we finally got the first and only commercial FM station on the air, so after school most of what I did was sit by the radio with my finger on the REC button for hours, waiting for a specific song (Think Erasure, Depeche Mode, Pet shop boys and Madonna) to come on. And then I’d record these tapes.

I am proud to say I got very popular in my class because of them, ‘cose I had the most complete songs – having learned to recognize the song by the split second of the first cord.

And so on my last visit to Moscow my mom hands me this box of teenage junk to sort through, and in it, amongst the diaries, dried roses from my first boyfriend and poison yellow shoelaces I find these tapes!!!

So over the 15 hours of flight back home I started this dress, and here it is now….