What in the World is That Made Out of?

Toilet Paper Wedding Dress

People spend a lot of cash on weddings; there’s no doubt about that. One of the biggest expenditures is the wedding dress, which seems kind of ridiculous since you only wear it once. So it’s not surprising that some frugal souls are trying to use nontraditional materials to make their wedding dresses. Website Cheap Chic Weddings has run a contest for almost a decade showcasing impressive gowns made of nothing but toilet paper. The craftsmanship on display here is just ridiculous. Let’s just hope it doesn’t rain on these ladies.

Blanket Rug

Carpets can be kind of gross. Like underwear, you don’t know what’s been rubbed on them or when they were cleaned. But this rug by designers Tejo Remy and Rene Veenhuizen might be enough to make us forget about that. It’s got a bizarre but totally unique organic shape, like a massive amoeba creeping across your floor. Even cooler is what it’s made out of – the designers took strips of old blankets and sewed them together in a free-form fashion, giving the rug an awesome texture against bare feet.

Shotgun Shell Chair

Furniture designers love to make chairs that are uncomfortable to sit in, but this one is ridiculous. Industrial designer Alexander Reh chose shotgun shells as his medium for the “Fully Loaded” chair, and he employed 450 .12 gauge shells to create the seat, which has a gently curved form to nestle the spine and rear. Don’t worry about any accidental discharge, though – each of the shells has been fired once and carefully refurbished. The raw metal can leave quite a mark on your skin if you sit in it naked, though.

Potato Car

From the outside, the WorldFirst F3 looks like any other Formula One race car – sleek, aerodynamic design, the works. But on the inside, this puppy is a very strange vehicle indeed. Built by the Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre in England, the WorldFirst F3 runs on a biodiesel engine, which isn’t terribly uncommon, but the car’s body and frame are made from a cunning combination of potato starch and flax fibers that are remarkably durable and resilient. Even the steering wheel is made from a polymer derived from carrots!

1,000 Door Building

Sure, it’s normal to include doors when you’re making a building, but typically they are used to connect rooms, not – whatever this is. This building by South Korean artist Choi Jeong-Hwa called “Doors” went up in 2009. The immense ten-story structure uses 1,000 recycled doors to create a perplexing palace of entries and exits. Let’s just say that you want to look before you leap when you’re walking around inside.

Cheese Handbag

We’ve covered some pretty bizarre materials in this article, but this one might just be the stinkiest. In 2011, students at Bath Spa University (that’s in England, so you don’t get confused) had the bright idea to make an entire couture collection out of 1,000 pounds of cheese. The artisans used Pilgrim’s Choice Vintage, Red Leicester and Extra Mature cheeses to create a variety of looks, but the most interesting is this all-cheese handbag that uses the wax from the rinds as a decorative accent.

Wood Motorcycle

You have to give props to Hungarian motorcycle maniac Istvan Puskas – the dude had a dream and seriously pursued it, leading to his construction of the world’s first wooden motorcycle. Carved out of durable, weatherproof black locust wood, the bike is powered by a repurposed Fiat engine that draws gasoline from a wooden gas tank. Something about the combination of flammable gasoline and all that wood makes us a little nervous, but what do we know? It doesn’t look like it has any shocks or suspension, though, so it might make for a bumpy ride.

Cassette Tape Skull

Of all the things on this list, this is the one we most want in our office. Sculptor Brian Dettmer uses old cassette tapes as his main medium, crafting astonishingly kick-ass images from the plastic casings and magnetic innards. He melts, breaks and fuses them in a variety of forms, but the awesomest is the human skull made entirely out of 80s heavy metal tapes pictured here. If you squint, you can see that the lower jaw is Motley Crue’s “Shout at the Devil.” He’s even made a complete human skeleton out of a staggering 180 tapes.