Feelin’ HOT HOT HOT! There were some heated moments in the three month long process to creating the ‘Tabasco Twins’ costume for the 2017 Hong Kong Sevens South Stand festivities. Using the picture below as inspiration, the process started as several trials, reconnaissance missions and a few failed attempts.

Originally I thought I could save some money by making a duct tape corset in lieu of buying one. However, the duct tape is too flexible to hold the shape and structure needed for the beads to lay flat and provide a flattering silhouette. In addition, the beads did not stick well to the duct tape and simply peeled or lifted off with little movement.

Emergency corsets were ordered from TaoBao, and after material costs, this actually factored to be less than a duct tape corset. BURNED! Due to time and funds, the decision was made to only bead an attachable front plate sporting the saucy logo instead of beading the entire corset.

To create the logo plate I painted the logo in green acrylic paint first and used it as a guide when hot gluing the green beads on. Then I simply filled in the negative space with the white beads. I sewed velcro strips to the corset to align with the hot glue gunned velcro on the back of the attachable logo plate.

For the Tabasco hat, I cut a hexagon shape out of card stock and then six rectangles to attach to each edge of the hexagon. Once taped together, it created the structure for the hat. Using red felt, I covered the entire hat before glueing it to a red headband.

The metallic green leggings were ordered off of Amazon, red ballet flats bought at H&M and the green wigs purchased in Shenzhen. All paired with a red lip and some attitude and we got ourselves a hot little number ya’ll!

The Tabasco Twins even made it into the Ten 10 Best Hong Kong Sevens Costumes of 2017 voted by Hong Kong Coconuts! Such sweet spiciness!