week 11 (25/11/24) - (1/12/24)

 On Monday, I came into college earlier than I needed to so I could continue with my pattern cutting. At this point I had only just finished one of my skirt patterns, so I moved onto my second skirt pattern with I found a bit easier now that I had done almost the exact same just a bit smaller the day prior. It was still a bit of a challenge because I had to use a measuring tape to be able to get the correct lengths and radius for my skirt. Even though I found this hard, I managed to finish my second skirt pattern within the first lesson, so I was able to move onto my final skirt pattern and complete a nice chunk of it within the second lesson. This matched up mostly with my goals for the lesson with me being just a little bit behind, so I decided to continue my pattern cutting after lunch during my study period. Thanks to this I was able to almost complete my pattern cutting of the skirt pieces, only needing to give seam allowances to the piece before cutting it up along the marked lines.

When I got to photography, we had a small talk about different photography related topics and then I got on with finishing my essay on different photographers through the decades. This was simple because I just needed to pick a photographer and discuss who they are and what their art is like. In the second half of the lesson, I worked on my triptych. Using 3 of my things that I carry with me when I go out (my phone, my headphones and my keys), I placed them on a plinth and tried to make the photos look cohesive with each other. One photo having the phone, one having the headphones and one having the keys. This was a relatively easy task to do because I knew a basic understanding of what I wanted to do and applied that composition to what I was photographing. I believe my outcome was successful because I was able to make a coherent set of photos that work well together.

 

Tuesday was my last day for my stretch work because it is the deadline for the sketchbook and the project that I had been working on. Thanks to this, and my work at home, I was able to finish my sketchbook early and move onto other work that I had, which for me included increasing the width of my underskirt pattern and creating most of my waistband pattern. This was a nice experience because it felt like a little bit of weight was lifted off me as I was able to get these things done with.

In Sam's lesson, it was over to us to do what we need to do. I decided that I needed to catch up with some of the annotations that I had been putting off for a bit which was a good choice because I now don't have to worry about them. I also tied in all the loose pieces of paper that I had like my collaborations page, research pages and annotations that were unable to fit on the pages that I was using or overall evaluations that I had made. This took up a good chunk of time in my lesson but during the rest of the lesson I decided to experiment with heat transfer paper using the paper that I had painted on last week. While I did make a mistake at first, both of my attempts came out satisfactory for me. I like the effect that the print had on the fabric, and I think that a matter fabric would work best with this method. I also enquired about doing a weaving pattern out of some of the fabric samples and got given some bondaweb so I can create an experiment with it in my own time.

 

Wednesday's lesson was Lareen was spent attempting to correctly attach my layer of skirt to my toile. However, I didn't get a lot done at all, I only managed to complete one of the French seams needed to attach the two half circle skirts together, so I did spend quite a while on one thing. I take this as a learning curve that I have taken knowledge from, however it is rather annoying that it took me so long only to complete one small thing on the toile. Hopefully it becomes easier over time as I continue to do quite a few French seams during the actual making of the skirt.

When I got home, I continued my toile where I tried to complete a better French seam than the one, I had done in class but I'm still a little bit stiff when I do it. Gathering it up was the easy part of doing this layer of skirt because all it required was to sew a gathering stitch, pinning the seams of the layer to the seams of the underskirt, pulling the ends of the gathering stitch and pinning the gathers to keep them fixed to the underskirt and sewing. It was a bit hard to make the gathers even but I managed to do it decently well.

 

In the morning of Thursday, I decided to finish my toile with the waistband. This was a little bit challenging for me because I have never done a waistband with a gathered layer, so I caught some of the layer in the stitching that I used for the waistband. Threading the waistband was also difficult because I found it difficult to pull the elastic all the way through the channel and make the gathering produced from that even through the waistband. I couldn't close the channel because the difference between the waistband lengths and the width of the toile underskirt so I will have to do a bit of research on how to do that.

I then experimented more on the work that I had done it my sketchbook, using different mediums to expand my understanding.

 

During Friday's lesson, I decided to work on my final pieces for my 6 fabric designs, this was simple as I already knew the medium that I wanted to use (fabric transfer dye and heat transfer paper). One hard thing was that I wanted to use one of the designs that I had created before but had to make five more cohesive designs that work with the first one and have a similar colour to it. When I used the first design the heat press had made the paper go a bit brown, so I decided to put the designs into the heat press by themselves to make them duller and browner like the first design. This worked and I was able to produce a decent colour that, while not the same, still works with the design.

Friday also began me finally being able to cut out my final pattern pieces for my skirt design, I decided to work on my underskirt first so I could get that out of the way and while I did make a few mistakes which I fixed, the underskirt process was simple enough for me to breeze through.

 

During the weekend I continued with my underskirt where I had to hem the bottom of the skirt which I found challenging because the type of fabric that I have used for it is difficult to manoeuvre and tended to not stay where I had ironed it to be. In the end the hem turned out a bit uneven, but I managed to fit everything in so that not raw edges were shown and nothing frayed.

The rest of my weekend was spent cutting out all the different layers of organza with my large half circle skirt patterns and baby locking the top and bottom edges, along with connecting both sides of each layer with French Seams. This was frustrating because I felt like I was spending too much time on this aspect rather than finishing work that I needed to do for my other lessons, especially my sketchbook.