Easter Holidays

I enjoyed being back home over Easter, seeing family and friends - it is easy to fall behind when your return home, as its comfortable, easy and familiar and way too many distractions. I remained quite disciplined, I successfully produced 20 pages of Metamorphosis the interdisciplinary process and completely finished Fashion, Art and Culture.

Before Easter we completed a Fabric Manipulation workshop - which was really enjoyable. The idea was to create your own fabrics out of existing materials. For example, using bubble wrap and bonding it to a flyer. This is one of the ways you can do it. Obviously there were more successful ones than others. I particularly liked kitchen foil bonded to knitwear - and then stretching it out to create cracks in the fabric... this gives an aged feel to it, and i linked this in to my metamorphosis research by comparing it to ageing skin. I decided to go with the idea of cobwebs, experimenting with wax and sinamay netting, working into images with paint and wax. Cutting out shapes, creating new shapes, photocopying, learning how to knit.... I really wanted to get stuck into this project. I thoroughly enjoyed the fabric manipulation, researching and design development, and looking back, I feel this is my best project so far.

At this point I was clear of what i wanted to produce, I made a toile and was happy with the outcome. However, it was at this point that i started to struggle, i received feedback that I hadn't implemented my own creative pattern cutting or metamorphosis. I started to panic and get flustered, i felt i was running out of time and i just couldn't get my head around pattern cutting.

It took a long long long time for me to finally understand it, it was simply trial and error, i just had to keep practicing. The final idea was a shirt block with bishop sleeves and skirt with darts that made it puff out. I used cotton muslin, which meant the structure of the skirt wouldn't work with this 'floaty' material. I produced an extra under-skirt made out of heavy weight calico, this helped the structure. Because of the nature of the cotton muslin, i could pull apart the weaves, and create a cobwebbed effect, i also added in structured cones that acted as shoulder pads made out of sinamay.

I felt the time we had to produce a garment, was limited. I struggled A LOT with the pattern cutting... creating your own pattern i found extremely difficult, and at times felt like giving up. But powering through, it payed off, i was semi happy with the final outcome, although i feel I could of developed the concept much more. Integrating the idea of cobwebs more.

These are the final images of the garment: