Highlights and Low lights...I'm not talking about hair either!

Designer mom hard at work!

Good evening. It's getting flipping dark isn't it!

Kicking off this weeks (rather late blog post) is this iPhone shot of me in action because I don't just sit around at college for 3 full days drawing, looking through magazines, playing with textiles and generally having a good laugh with my tutors and studio buddies.

Drafting my garment pattern from scratch!

A lot has gone into getting me at this stage in the photo....Design development-20 pages of inspiration and my own development and interpretation on the words Stripped, Striped and Strapped. Our brief for this term. Then came customer profiling and market profiling and a client/creative muse. Who can I see wearing my garments? Where can I see them in the market? High end high street? Boutique? or cheap and cheerful? In between all of this I touched on my colour palette and initial ideas for fabrics and then designing a collection of garments.This is just a very brief overview of what we've been doing and It's really opened my eyes up to what goes on behind the scenes of fashion. You don't just make clothes..There is a whole 'science' and process behind it of which I'm learning and very much appreciating!

With my initial garments drawn...I've now selected a few to delve into a bit more and further develop for my collection and selected one garment to make! Eeeeeekkkkkk...We are making in this brief. Now this is what I came on this course for..to construct and make garments. It's so exciting! Although it's not all been singing and dancing...I've been very frustrated too and had some great highlights but also been feeling rather low and useless and I'll admit that perhaps I just can't do any of this...Studying full time, all the work we have to do outside of college hours and all my parental and home responsibility too. It was really getting on top of me last week but with some organisation put in place and a good chat with my tutors, I'm in a good place and have a more positive attitude. I don't give up easy and I'm having to remind myself that it's been 14 yrs or so since I was in education..Go easy on your self, girl!

Manipulating on the stand

In the photos here, are just some initial ideas regarding details to my garment designs...We are encouraged to physically 'play' and manipulate with the fabric on the stand and this has really helped me with my initial concept and determine some details in regards to our stripped, stripped and strapped theme for the brief. Can anybody see a relation to the theme?

Free motion embroidery

Over in textiles I had a go at some free motion embroidery and loved it. It took some getting used too and I lost my thread 4 times and broke a needle twice which quickly escalated in me wanting to throw the machine out of the window but finally I was happy to have produced this piece of textile art. We were asked to collect white items only and visualise a landscape so here is my all white, free motion landscape...TADAAAAAA      

In textiles we are also linking up our fashion brief I've talked about  and exploring pattern ideas. I know at this stage my pattern is going to be a naive, crude, distressed stripe so I had a go using dispersed ink with different items...For this one I used a cheese cutting wire, dipped into the ink and dragged along the paper. It's created almost the stripe I am after.  Using the dispersed ink means that I can test this out on some fabric on the heat press and see what It will look like as a print. Watch this space!

      
 Well as always I do a lot of talking. Thank you again if you read this to the bottom and following my journey. For those who follow my photography, my latest self portrait is up and can be viewed here.

Thanks my loves. Abi xxx