Week 10 (18/11/24) - (24/11/24)

 When I came into class on Monday, I started to develop and annotate the designs that I had produced during the weekend. I tried to talk about processes, colours, ideas that I had for the skirts because I wanted to improve my ability to evaluate and annotate my designs. Some we harder than others, meaning I had less annotations for those but there were some that I had a lot to write about. I also decided to redo my mood board so I could improve the layout and writing and put down some experiments using different fabrics. I found that using a baby locking machine game me the desired effect when using something like organza because the small but strong line of solid colour running across the bottom of it gives it a standout effect that would work well if I wanted to do contrasting threads for my skirt.

My last lesson was a mix of photography and doing work in my main sketchbook. We were tasked with creating a diptych of something or someone and I chose to do a diptych of my shoes because I wanted to expand my ideas out from just creating photos of people. I used a tripod to stand the shoes up to be able to reach the light in the setup that we had and created different compositions used both of my shoes to create different effects with the finished piece. My favourite composition that came from this shoot was one where the two shoes are diagonal because they work well together. I do wish I could have completed one more experiment where I angled the shoes down so I could achieve more of a birds eye view of the shoes but I still think the diagonal one would have been my favourite outcome.

 

Tuesday started off with me completing the finishing touches of my poster project in stretch before I scanned it into the computer to make final touch-ups and edits. I wanted to make the outcome be more saturated so it can stand out more and be full of life. This is to go along with my theme of the future and what it could be. I then printed it off to stick in my book so I could complete a thorough analysis of the work that I had completed. This covered 3 pages of my A4 sketchbook, so I am sure I was able to successfully describe my thoughts and feelings and why I did what I did for my final piece. I was able to think about why I did what I did and what things had informed me during my journey of researching and designing my poster that had led to my outcome.

 

With Sam we started to develop experiments with fabric paint and the dyes that we used for our wallpaper section in our project. I found that working with the dyes was more comfortable for my but not the main dyes, instead the watercolour pallet dyes that I had access too. This is because there were more colours, and I could chose the amount of liquid I wanted to be in the dye I was using. This also helped with the depth I was able to achieve. While not extensive, it still improved the designs visually. I think some are better than others since some of them started to bleed too much into the fabric so I will try and see how to improve this in the future.

With Charlie in CAD we worked on completing our wrapping paper so we could have them finished and printed on time.

 

Wednesday began with me starting to plan out and pattern cut my finished skirt design that I wanted to carry through with for the rest of the project. I think this will be quite the challenge because I need to account for gathering that I have decided will be 0.5 times the length of the finished outcome. I want to have layers so I will have to buy a lot of fabric and cut out large pieces to be able to complete this. I will also need a lot of patterns cutting paper considering this. I decided to create mini patterns to be able to properly visualise how my pattern would work.

When I got home, I decided to have a sit down and go through all my photography work, print out my favourite ones of all the photos I took and annotate them in my book so that I could catch up on the work and not have to worry about it when it comes closer to the deadline of the project. This was a good decision because I was able to catch up with my work instead of repeatedly pushing it away because I have other things to do. One thing I did notice was that my evaluations of my work were lacking and simple so in the future I want to improve on these evaluations so I can create a well thought out consideration of my work.

 

Thursday was my time to catch up with every little thing that I had not done in my sketchbook yet, collaborations, research pages, etc. I cannot keep putting things back in reaction to things I had been doing in college. If I do this again it might me bad because I would have big chunks of work missing with not enough time to fix it. I need to plan out my time properly to make sure that I am on track with my work and not getting behind.

 

When I got into class on Friday, I started using fabric transfer dye on a thin paper so that I could transfer a design onto fabric. While doing it I wanted to take what I had done in my experiments before and apply them to the fabric experiments. One thing I did find out through this process is that synthetic fabrics work best to transfer the colour, but they turn out very saturated on the fabric. I think I want to do something with the paper that I painted on after they are heated up and transferred to the fabric because they gain a more parchment-like appearance due to the heat of the heat press. I could use heat transfer paper or interlock different designs. I will consider this later.

I also decided to stay after my class time to be able to have a larger surface that I can create my patterns on. It started of simple because all I needed to do was replicate my process in making an A-line skirt and then simply make it longer to be my desired length. This was easy because I had already done it before to, I wasn't worried about making any mistakes. After I had created my pattern for my underskirt, I started on making my first layer pattern for my layers that I wanted on my skirt. In hindsight this was difficult because I had never created a pattern like this before. I did successfully create a full circle skirt pattern; however, my ideal was to create a half circle skirt pattern instead so I wasted my time creating a pattern that I wouldn't use. It wasn't all terrible though because I was able to take that mistake and use it as a learning point so I wouldn't make it again. 

 

The weekend was filled with me trying to finish my circle skirt patterns and do my underskirt toile. During this process I found that I wanted to use elastic for my waistband, so I must make my underskirt patterns a bit wider. This means that I must add length to the centre front and centre back of my underskirt patterns which is simple, so I'm not worried about that. However, I did have to do a lot of time-consuming maths to figure out the correct size I would have to make my circle skirt. This meant that all my time was spent doing this and I was unable to complete anything else. This was frustrating because it was taking so long, mixed with a small anxiety that I wouldn't be able to complete my skirt if I didn't get it done as soon as possible, it was a bit of a stressful weekend.