It was late at night and Bailey Musnicki was sitting in her room, bored out of her mind. She took out her phone, opened up the TikTok app, and mindlessly scrolled through some videos. Suddenly, an idea popped in her head! She headed off to the fabric store and returned with the necessary materials. She cut the fabric she bought and started to create her own senior Homecoming dress.

“I am a very spontaneous person, and I’m also an easily bored person. I was by JoAnn Fabrics and I thought ‘It’d be cool if I started a new project,’ but I had no idea what to make,” Musnicki explained. “Then I realized, Homecoming’s coming up! And right there, in front of that JoAnn Fabrics, decided to make my senior homecoming dress from scratch.”

She posted her progress on the dress with the app, TikTok. The first video blew up and has currently reached 1.9 million likes. Musnicki has reached 465.7K followers on the app, and she has made 11 dress-related videos so far, each as popular as the last. Although, not every comment on the videos is positive, the response is still overwhelming.

“I deal with the negative comments by just not taking them too closely to heart, and focusing on the more positive ones; A lot of people are there defending me, which is amazing. I try to stay out of it,” Musnicki states. “People have the right to comment what they want, you know. I have no right to limit what people say about my dress, and I love that people are defending me, but I personally am fine with just ignoring them as long as I personally love my dress, and I do.”

Not only has she made her dress from scratch, but Musnicki has also been nominated for Homecoming court. Without her fame on TikTok, she doesn’t think she would’ve been nominated. Even though she has a lot of friends who voted for her regardless, she says that the fame is what pushed her over the ledge.

“The nomination makes me feel so flattered,” she says. “I know a lot of people have been following the dress and I’ve befriended so many people in the past four years here, but it’s really cool to know that so many people voted for me, and I am absolutely honored. I mean, getting all that recognition on TikTok itself was pretty rewarding, because it was just really cool to see people reaching out and think that my dress was cool. And that was enough for me. Getting on Homecoming court, that’s just the icing on the cake.”

Musnicki’s wishes for this year’s dance is to have fun­—and make sure her dress doesn’t fall apart. “For senior year, I hope to just get more connected in the school because I don’t want to be that person that graduates and looks around and only knows three people sitting by me. I want to be able to reach out and make those connections. And it’s going to hurt when I have to say goodbye to this school, but I’m okay with it because I really put myself out there and put myself into the school.”

Doing something you love will always result in something to be proud of because, at one point or another, someone went out of their comfort zone to try new things. For Bailey, sitting in her room sewing all night is a dream. When it comes to something as important as senior Homecoming, everything has to be perfect — the hair, the shoes, and for most girls, the dress. There’s no better way to express yourself and make sure your dress is just right than to simply do it yourself.