... And the Winner Is....

What do you get when you mix interior design materials, interior designers, and a bunch of people who cant seam to get rid of cysts that grown on their internal organs (PC? probably not)? -Fashion Remix
As Darrin Brooks, our valiant team leader said it:
"IIDA's Fashion Remix, is an interior design charity fashion show to benefit cystic fibrosis. 23 architectural and interior design firms created dresses out of interior materials such as carpet, tile, wallcovering and other building products. The teams drew a vendor out of a hat in April and then we spent a lot of time creating our dresses.
Here is our dress made out of office chair fabric ( like a trampoline fabric) a chair back, mouse & electrical cording and 12 desk lights. We had a great team!!! Dream team."
As the winners for the night were announced we became increasingly excited. We knew we had the very best dress, and we were not going to get stuck with some lame award like "best use of hard materials". When the awards had almost been all given out they announced the "Peoples Choice Award".
...And the winner of the "Peoples Choice Award" is- drum role please (you, the reader, can find some solid object to tap on before reading this)- Utah State University! We were all invited up on stage to take pictures with our model and show off our amazing crew to the crowd. As we left the stage the announcer asked us to stay and take a couple more picture BECAUSE (drum roll) we were also "Best of Show" (First Place). The crowd went crazy! The whole experience was amazing!
If you hadn't already guessed it I was the technical systems designer. My job on the team was to find a way to take parts of a task chair and create a dress frame, drilling, tapping, welding, whatever it took. When finished with that I needed to outfit the frame with 12 LED desk lamps. Since the lamps retailed at $450 a pop, yes, $450 a pop, I had to figure out a way to incorporate and power them without altering them. this meant a bunch of radio shack junk, 20 hours of soldering and TWENTY-FOUR 9volt batteries to power them all.

I was also the photographer for the night, and yes, that first amazing photagraph of our dress was taken by me! Here are a couple of the other dresses from the night.