Handmade Paper Garments: Dreaming of Sleep

No this isn’t a dream, it is real. 

A Minnesota artist has created a surprisingly stunning, floor-length nightdress -- made out of 2,000 Walgreens prescription labels for sleeping pills.

Dreaming of Sleep is the title of the new work by Erica Spitzer Rasmussen, an artist from St Paul, Minnesota who specializes in making handmade paper garments. 

The inspiration for it came to Rasmussen in, fittingly, a dream but the idea initially came from her long-time use of sleeping pills to get proper rest each night. 

"I’m an insomniac," she says. "Sadly, a satisfying night’s sleep for me generally requires medication." 

She says after a particularly restless night the alarm clock woke her and she wrote "dreaming of sleep" on a pad o f paper next to the bed. 

"Dreaming of Sleep is a self-portrait that illustrates my dependence on those staples of the pharmaceutical industry." 

It uses materials including cotton, tissue paper and scanned prescriptions actually custom-printed on peel-and-stick wallpaper by Spoonflower.com - www.spoonflower.com – a custom fabric and wallpaper website.   

"I simply scanned a page full of sleeping pill labels (which I’d been saving for years), uploaded them to the Spoonflower website, and ordered the first of many rolls of wallpaper printed with them. In a week’s time, life-size medication labels appeared at my doorstep."  

It took Rasmussen four months and four eight-foot rolls of custom wallpaper to make the four-foot tall nightgown. It involved her cutting and stitching some 2,000 replicas of sleeping pill prescription labels.

"I then integrated a secret note to myself into the hem and completed the work," she says.

Ra smussen calls the nightdress a sculptural object, designed for exhibiting rather than wearing. The nightgown has been through various iterations. 

"I tried numerous material experiments, all of which failed until Spoonflower introduced their custom designed peel-and-stick wallpaper." 

She has created other unusual garments in the past. The most similar to her latest work was a life-sized wedding dress called Mail Order Bride that she made in 2007 out of thousands of canceled postage stamps, collected from around the world over eight years. It was designed as a comment on the mail-order bride business and its growth in the Internet age.

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