Final decisions..

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After designing another set of designs, linking to draping photos and more research development, Jenny and I narrowed down the 40 designs to a final line up of 8, which is one of our assessment components. All in which had to compliment each other and vary slightly in style and size. The final 8 that we chose are by far my favourite designs and I’m happy with that decision, and now can’t wait to see my final 2 made!

Here are the final 8, ranging from oversized t-shirt dresses to playsuits and raglan t-shirts and shorts.

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Getting my fashion brain back into gear..

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Today was all about creating fashion collages using photocopies of samples and my sketchbook work, enlarging and reducing the size of them and putting them on a fashion figure to create ideas for garments. At first I wasn’t too sure on the idea as normally I just put a pen to paper and start designing, but I wanted to get inspiration from this to see how much it helps. After a few initial attempts, my brain got into gear and loved creating these collages. Usually I just design and make for boys but this project I wanted to see if I could create a unisex garment so I decided to design for girls and boys to see what I could create.

Here are just a few of my outcomes, I managed to successfully make 15 girls and 15 boys fashion collages.

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Now it’s time to create a template and start designing from these!

Four weeks to go!

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Weaver fever..

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Over the next two weeks is the Easter holidays, the perfect time to spend time with family and do lots of uni work! My first stop when I arrived home was Hobbycraft to get some jersey yarn called Boodles, which is quirky chunky oversized yarn (http://www.boodlesyarn.com/#//) as it’s the only stockist. I wanted to start to weave with a different yarn rather than just wool to create a different texture and weight. Also combining this with PVC and wool to create pops of different texture. Here are my first two samples with the jersey yarn and other materials.

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 I find my second sample much stronger as it combines more materials and creates different textures. The one thing I would like to add to this is thicker PVC stripes to create see through panels and more lilac yarn once I find something suitable.

My next step is to do more sketchbook and concentrate on more weave with wool yarn, combining it with other materials.

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More More More..

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After having a good few days of doing sketchbook, I’m feeling much more positive about my progress and this project. So here is a little update of my progress since I last posted about it. I focused on inspiration from Wassily Kandinsky and combining it with embroidery. I can imagine this on an over-sized t-shirt or jumper all connecting together. One thing I need to focus on now is finding my colour palette, as a lot is going on so I just need to condense them down.

Finishing with some composition ideas of a view finder from a response in my sketchbook, this will also be what I work on next, making them larger scale and using different media.

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Knit and chatter!

Yesterday was all about knit, experimenting with the knit machines and seeing what techniques could be made. Luckily at uni we have a guest lecturer, Gail Sallis, who is an expert at knit, and she kindly helped me with how to use the machines, and showing me various ways of creating texture. Looping the yarn up, threading it through the needles, creating holes, adding on fabric, are some of the ways she showed us. Here are some photos of the progress.

Knitting is a technique I’ve always wanted to be good at, so hopefully now I can become an expert and use this knowledge to its full potential!

Onto the next project..

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For the next nine weeks my blog will be taken over with my work, taking you through the journey of my new project and the steps I make. Our new project is called Design: Enterprise and Innovation and consists of projects within this title. There are two options within this projects, one being live projects, which is working with somebody from industry, then this is split up into women’s wear/kid’s wear, men’s wear and Graduate Fashion Week. Then the second option you could do is placement or erasmus within a fashion company.

I’ve chosen to do the live project for women’s wear and kid’s wear which is working alongside Jenny Postle, one half of the textiles and knit brand Leutton Postle. Coming from a textile background, I’m very keen and excited to make this project work and be successful.

The project is to work on a collection for the brand Leutton Postle and develop both final fashion designs and textile samples. We have to focus on bringing new materials into work in an original way whilst steering clear from the typical ‘upcycle’ ‘crafty’ aesthetic. We also need to keep our work ‘high fashion’ and experimental yet refined. The focus of the start of this project is strong research as research it key to Leutton Postle’s creative process and should be very important to our own work and design development.

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The key components for the hand in for this project consist of:

– A sketchbook full of design development including research, drawing, painting, collage etc

– 8 (minimum A4 size) textile samples which show clear consideration of composition

– Line up of 8 looks clearly showing textile use and placement (yarn/fabric indicators)

– One fully made garment including fully executed textiles application

The images below are a few inspiration images Jenny gave to us to make our brains think in the right way and feel inspired by them.  (Sorry if they are slightly blurry, I scanned them in from our brief)

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My next step is heading to the library to look at some books and artists Jenny has given us as a starting point to get our brains ticking. Hopefully from this I can get a few different ideas and start the creative process!

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