Girl makes prom dress from drink-can tabs

By Laura Giovanelli
Media General News Service
Published: June 16, 2008

ADVANCE - Lina Fernandez was the homecoming queen at Davie High School this school year. She wore a pair of long, flowing black pants that rippled around her ankles as she walked across the football field.

So for the prom, would you expect her to be content with the usual, something beaded, satiny or ruffly?

Like, no.

Lina made her prom dress, but not out of fabric. It’s made out of thousands of shiny, slippery tabs from soda and beer cans.

There are 4,940 can tabs that make up the skirt. Lina’s not sure about the top. It’s all held together by thin shiny black ribbon and thread, and it and weighs about 4 pounds.

Lina, 18, who graduated from Davie High on June 6, collected can tabs in the high-school cafeteria. She put out a container and a sign at the Oak Valley Golf Club pool. She did not, she insists, drink all that soda herself. “If I did that, I’d be fat, and most of the reason I made it is because I’m so tiny, so it wasn’t a lot to do,“ she said.

Around January, she started weaving the can tabs together with thin, shiny black ribbon based on some jewelry that she had made. She had vague ideas about entering one of the scholarship competitions, the ones in which high-school students compete by making prom duds out of duct tape and other materials that are usually reserved for repairing things, not haute couture.

Lina’s not so impressed with those outfits. “I’ve never seen a dress made out of can tabs,“ she said.

At one point, she had to rework some of the top. She wanted to make something strapless, with a V-shaped back, but she started to run out of time so she went with an easier design.

Her mother, Elsa, suggested that she didn’t have to make an entire dress. Lina wanted to finish it. When she was done with the pieces, her mother sewed them together. That alone took about two weeks.

The result was a slinky, sexy dress that looks like something out of Project Runway crossed with medieval chain mail. The skirt rattles like a flapper’s dress around her petite, 4-foot-11-inch frame when she walks. When she has to get up and down stairs, she hops instead of steps.

On May 24, Prom Night, the dress made it through dinner at the Village Tavern (“Luckily if anything spilled on my dress, it wasn’t going to soak in,“ Lina said), but it started to come apart during miniature golf. She called her mom, who brought more ribbon for emergency repairs in the bathroom.

At the actual dance, the dress survived some slow songs and formal portraits. The guy taking photos gave Lina a free keychain with her photo because he was impressed with the dress.

But by 10:30 p.m., she was ready to change into her back-up dress - her prom dress from last year. Yes, it was frothy. Yes, it was sequined - but just a little.

“I sometimes strive for unique,“ Lina said, “but I try not to flaunt it.“

nLaura Giovanelli writes for the Winston-Salem Journal.