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What do you get when you mix a school project with an industrial-size package of Starburst?

Grimsley High senior Kelly Henriksen got a prom dress, shoes and accessories, plus a bow tie for her date.

Henriksen, 18, made her dress from duct tape, masking tape and about 450 individual wrappers and 20 packages of Starburst candy.

“A couple of years ago, I made an iPod case from Starburst wrappers, and I saw a dress made out of newspapers and I thought 'I can do that,’” Henriksen said.

“I picked Starburst because the wrappers are made of wax-covered paper,” she said. “It’s more sturdy, and the candy doesn’t stick as much.”

The dress started out as a class project for her honors art and design class. The first stage of the project was to create sketches and designs, her art teacher Kat Kraszeski said.

“Then for the second part, I told her she really needed to make something,” she said.

That something turned out to be her prom dress.

“Making it a class project was the only way to discipline myself to finish it,” Henriksen said.

To get started, Henriksen was going to need Starburst wrappers — and a lot of them.

Her mom purchased the economy-size package from a big-box store and Henriksen called on her friends to help.

“I told all my friends they could eat as many of them as they wanted as long as the wrappers stayed perfectly intact,” she said.

After about three days, Henriksen and her friends managed to provide more than 1,000 of the pink, red, yellow and orange wrappers. Then began the sorting of clean, intact wrappers.

Starburst isn’t her favorite candy, but the bright, colorful wrappers appealed to her.

“They just look really good,” she said. “I’m really a chocolate kind of girl.”

It took three tries to get the skirt right, as Henriksen had to serve as her own mannequin.

Once her parents heard about her plan to wear the dress to prom, they tried to convince her otherwise.

“Initially, I was concerned that she was trying to save the household some money, then she explained it,” her dad, Eric, said.

Her goal was to finish the dress and wear it somewhere, she said.

“All the adults said that it wouldn’t hold up, but it’s got several rolls of duct tape, it wasn’t going anywhere.”

As a backup, Henriksen took along a purple dress that she already had. She did end up changing her dress before the end of the night.

“I’m glad I had to change because I was too hot instead of it falling apart,” she said.

With her fashion sense and her proficiency in creating this dress without a pattern, Kraszeski and another art teacher are encouraging her to pursue a career in fashion.

Henriksen’s dad agrees.

“I think there is a budding career under all those wrappers,” he said.

Contact Tiffany S. Jones at 373-7157 or tiffany.jones@news-record.com