Two years ago, Regan Kerr, a junior at George Washington High School, in Aurora, Colorado, decided to turn her small pop tab collection into a daring project: to create her own prom dress out of thousands of pull tabs.

According to 9news.com, Regan’s ingenious dress started out as a weird collection of pop tabs, which soon turned into a joke, then became a very serious two-year project that culminated on prom night, Saturday night. A couple of years ago, a friend suggested she start collecting pop tabs, and she soon got the idea to make a dress out of them, because she had always thought “a great prom dress should pop”. It was a really intriguing project, but she had never made a dress before, let alone one from thousands of pop tabs. Her friend, Sara Sanford, remembers thinking it was a cool idea, but she also believed “it would kind of peter out and wouldn’t actually happen.” She was wrong!

Over the last two years, Regan, with the help of family and friends, has been gathering pop tabs from various fizzy drinks, until she finally got enough to make her metallic prom outfit. The process didn’t take a lot of skill, as she was just pulling a needle up and down, but it still took her around five months to finish. It might sound like a long time, but you have to consider this was the first dress she ever made, and she did have a few issues to solve. “The zipper in the back became a problem because you have to sew around it and make sure you’re not interfering with the zipper,” Regan said.

On Saturday, Regan finally fulfilled her dream of going to prom in a unique dress, made of thousands of pop tabs (5,114, to be exact). And just in case you’re wondering, no, she didn’t drink that many sodas herself.

A year ago, we featured another impressive pop tab prom dress, made by another resourceful American student called Maura Pozek.