Week 6 (14/10/24) - (20/10/24)

 Monday was my last day to work on my pencil skirt in college. This made me a bit stressed but I managed to slow myself down a little bit and not rush so I wouldn't make too many mistakes. I didn't worry too much about mistakes anyways since this is a technical sample so I could use it to educate me on what not to do in the future. During the lesson I managed to complete attaching my waistband and sewing the petersham in - bagging it at the ends. The waist band was a bit tricky since I had messed up the seam allowance (1cm instead of 1.5cm) and the waistband itself was too small for the skirt due to me sewing the darts a bit too small. I will need to consider this in the future.

I also ended up doing some sewing samples of button holes on the school machine so i could put it in my folder for future reference. It was a bit hard to understand how the button hole process worked on the machine since the BERNINA 1008 is a fully manual machine while my machine (the 1260) does some of the work for you (stitch length, width, etc.). The 1008 has a knob that you turn every time you need the action to change while the 1260 has a button.

During photography, the first lesson was spent starting out producing an essay on photography from the 1920s-60s which was fairly simple. I made sure to talk in third person so I can make a a bit of it and make work that is more professional and unopinionated. The second half consisted of my taking more photos of my hat (on a stand instead of a person) and, later, using coloured paper to make interesting compositions out of corners. This was a fun and engaging activity but I feel like I have a limited range of pictures and compositions, so I will try and do better next time.

At home a started finishing my pencil skirt, finishing the waistband first and then doing some more practice with buttons before I eventually sewed that onto the LHS of the waistband. The hardest part of doing this was when I finished sewing the back of the waistband using stitch- in-the-ditch because I found it hard to see sometimes where the waistband was so I wouldn't sew a top-stitch. I did make a mistake when sewing the button hole because I made it too small so I had to extend it which made it a bit messy.

Tuesday started off with Lizzie in stretch where we developed three of our favourite designs into more detail and colour. I think I did alright with developing them into more detail but I didn't finish them in lessons so I will have to complete them before next lesson. I do think that they don't look amazing because I found it hard to translate my ideas into proper designs, especially since I'm not great at drawing bodies.

The last lesson of the day was the class trying something new. Natural dye. This was an interesting interactive experience and I found it interesting the processes that can affect the outcome of the dye. One problem that I came across was that I have hay fever and the crushing and squishing of the leaves set it off so I didn't have a true hands on approach when it came to the actual dyeing process. In the future I think it would be best to do it in a well ventilated area so I have less of a chance to be affected by the leaves.

On Wednesday, we started to think about how to create a pencil skirt pattern. We tried two methods of creating the pattern, cut-n-slash and the pivot method. The cut and slash method is the one I am most used to and have seen the most in practice. The pivot method was a bit more confusing, I have never seen it done or done it myself and it wasn't as clear as the cut-n-slash method but I managed to understand it in the end. I think in the future I will mainly stick with the cut-n-slash method.

Thursday was my day to finish off my work in my sketchbook to be handed in on Friday. I spent the majority of the day sewing some textiles experiments to put in my book. This was time-consuming because I spent a decent amount of time trying to see if my overlocker would work (it didn't), I will need to work on making sure it can work. I tried to do this because I wanted to overlock the edges of the fabric that I was tying into my book so it wouldn't fray. I think the finished pieces came out looking good but I think I could have applied a bit more colour into the experiments since they all use black thread.

The final part of my day was spent finishing off all my unfinished blogs and posting to Instagram to keep up to date along with writing my evaluation of all my work.