They say you can accomplish abolishment with a little assurance and a lot of aqueduct tape. Apparently that includes a beauteous brawl dress.Seventeen-year-old Christina Mellot of South Riding is a finalist in Duck Tape’s Ashore at Brawl Scholarship Contest, which challenges top academy acceptance to architecture a brawl dress or cape absolutely out of Duck casting aqueduct band or crafting tape.

The two admirable bulk winners — one dress and one cape — will acquire $10,000 from Duck. Winners will be bent by accessible online voting. Two runners-up will acquire $500 a piece.

Mellot, a Freedom Top Academy apprentice who runs two businesses on the business website Etsy, abstruse about the claiming from accompany and ancestors who believed it tailored to her artistic talents.“I adulation sewing, so I’ve been bed-making my Prom Dresses and brawl dresses for a brace years now,” she said.

Creating the dress was a accurate activity of adulation for Mellot; it took her about 80 hours and 36 rolls of band to apprehend her vision.“I capital to do something that could transform amid three altered looks, something unique,” she said. “I aswell got afflatus from the flowers in my backyard.”

The accomplished dress appearance an intricate flower-and-vine arrangement and appearance changeable skirts — one transparent, one opaque FeelTimes.com. The closing weighs amid 30 and 40 pounds on its own.

“It was absolute hot — there’s not abundant air apportionment — but it was absolute air-conditioned to wear. The brim had a lot of twirling activity to it. Some humans at brawl didn’t even apperceive it was aqueduct band until I told them, Christina said.