Indiana Mother-Daughter Make High-Fashion Gowns Out of Newspapers

— -- Senior high school portraits may never look the same thanks to an out-of-the-box-thinking mother and daughter photography duo from Indiana.

Marci Ralph and her daughter, Christy Maiquez, of Camby, Indiana, were looking for ways to increase the buzz about their photography studio when Ralph decided to act on an idea she’d had in her mind for the past decade.

“I saw a fashion program in Chicago that did an unconventional materials fashion show for charity and I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I have to do this,’” Ralph, 51, told ABC News. “I’ve always wanted to build a newspaper dress.”

Ralph and Maiquez, 33, own Marci & Christy Photography, a studio that focuses mainly on taking students’ senior year photos, a tradition Ralph calls “very big in the Midwest.”

The duo recruited two of their “senior models,” girls who help spread the word about the studio to their friends, to be the models for this special project, which was shot Tuesday.

Ralph and Maiquez worked without a pattern for the newspaper-constructed dresses, relying solely on inspiration from Pinterest to create an outline for each of the two dresses. They ran into their first glitch early Tuesday morning when they discovered their small town does not sell many newspapers.

“We figured we could buy just newspapers so we didn’t plan ahead,” Ralph said. “We went to our local drugstores and they’d have like one newspaper. One of the model’s mom’s parents save newspapers, so they saved us.”

Ralph estimates they ended up using about 50 newspapers to complete the dresses, which were made of newspaper and duct tape.

“We built the dresses right onto the girls because there are no zippers or anything,” she said. “We started by duct taping on a newspaper bodice and then while Christi was doing their makeup and hair, I was building the trains of the dresses on the ground.”

“It literally took us less than two hours per dress to construct them,” Ralph said.

The process was interrupted by another glitch, a nearly 2-inch flood in their garage-level studio that forced them to grab everything and run upstairs to finish the photo shoot.

“That is where I started to throw it in at one point,” Ralph said of nearly giving up her idea. “But we just carried everything upstairs and carried on.”

“We just said, ‘This is what we’re going to do and we’re just going to make it work,’” she recalled.

The photos of the results of their labor speak for themselves, showing highly detailed, runway-ready gowns with dramatic hair and makeup to match.

“We were all pretty taken aback by what we were able to do in the short amount of time we gave ourselves,” Ralph said. “It makes it that more special because it came together that quickly for us.”

The two models, Sarah Reynolds and Anna Jennings, were Snapchatting and Instagramming photos all day of their transformations, according to Ralph.

Ralph was so pleased with the results she posted the first photos immediately on Instagram and Facebook, where they caught the eye of ABC affiliate WRTV in Indianapolis, which came one day later to shoot a whole story on the gowns.

“I’d say this worked,” Ralph said of their original goal, to increase the studio’s visibility.

Ralph says she and her daughter had so much fun they are sad it is over, but are looking forward to surprising their customers with something even more creative.

“I compared it to Thanksgiving dinner where we spent all this time making the dresses and then it was over,” she said. “I’m a past school art teacher though, so I have notebooks full of ideas.”