Reflection- Presentation

I really enjoyed the presentation that Charlotte Heylar delivered to us. I found it really helpful and interesting to see what people working in the industry were doing. I also really liked that she didn't just create mass produced digital designs. I thought it was really interesting to see that she produced her work by hand using innovate techniques. 

I felt that our group presentation went quite well although i wish i had been more confident when i was speaking. I have never been good at speaking in front of people but presenting as a group i felt helped. I think that we got across the point we wanted to. I feel that more than others our garment and project needed explaining because it doesn't show a clear theme. Although Rachel and Charlotte did not say a lot about our project i think that they understood it a lot more after we presented it and it made more sense to them. We basically just wanted to get across how much we wanted it to be a very unique and creative look. Almost as if the whole garment was a canvas created by us. 

Reflection- Final Garment

After much deliberation throughout our project on what we wanted our final outcome to be i believe that we have achieved what we wanted to overall. Although we did not agree on everything as a group throughout the project i think our final outcome has been successful in portraying the fairground fun that we wanted it too. After Vanessa had created the trousers for the garment using the geometric pattern fabric we found and the engineered screen print we created on the green fabric, we then chose lots of different ways of draping our created fabric on the stand and narrowed it down to our favourite ones until we agreed on our final garment shape. With me and Nadine both being textiles students we were unsure of how to pattern cut or make up the garments. So this task naturally fell onto Vanessa and i feel that she worked incredibly well to create the final garments and i was very impressed by her hard work and dedication, to creating the ideas that we had all discussed as a group. 

The images above show the front and back of our final garments. And i am really pleased with how they have turned out. At first i was worried that we had been to ambitious with what we wanted to create in the time frame that we had. I am proud of my team and i feel that we have worked well as a group to achieve what we have. Although we didn't always see eye to eye on every idea and one group member was continuously late every day, I feel that we have created what we wanted to based on our initial concept design. This is our final design and illustration of our garment.

Reflection- Creating Our Fabric

We decided to create our own fabric from scratch. First spraying it with silver spray paint to give it a unique shiny feel. After this we all used it like a big canvas. Each of us putting our own individual marks onto the fabric. Using brusho, paints, crayons and inks we created a full length piece of fabric we were using as the base of our shirt fabric. I was really pleased with how our fabric turned out when we draped it on the mannequin. Because i feel that there was a time after creating the fabric where all 3 of us thought we had ruined it. After printing our fabrics and then creating our large one we cut out diamond shapes and appliquéd them onto the fabric in certain places where we thought they fit with our engineered prints. 

Reflection- Print Room

In the print room we used our screen to create our prints on the fabric we had bought. With this in mind we printed our fabric and cut out diamond shapes which we then appliquéd onto the fabric that we were going to make ourselves. It was very good to have 3 people working on the prints in the print room because although space was tight, we got a lot more prints done in a shorter amount of time. As the screen we were using was quite large we needed 2 people to hold it in place while the third person printed. I think that the prints that we created were successful. Especially because we only managed to get one day booked into the print room.

Here are some of our print samples.

Reflection- Sampling

Before we created our final fabric we had to create lots of fabric samples so we knew what it was going to come out like.  These are samples that i created using brusho. It was quite hard to achieve the same effect twice using brusho so each sample i created looked different. But by creating so many it gave us an idea of what we could create for our final piece of fabric. 

These are the fabrics that we had already sourced for our project 

Reflection- Design Ideas

After we realise that we no longer wanted to do a simple dress shape we started draping our fabric on the stand and realised that we wanted our garment to be big and over the top. We took inspiration from our draping looking at the oversized shapes and silhouettes. We change the direction of our project and decided that we wanted to create a sort of costume like what a clown would wear. We also decided that we wanted to hand produce it all and not use any digital printing. Here are some of our designs 

We have designed them to be over the top and really colourful to test our use of our colour pallet and our prints. We want to create something very unique. Although this was quite a bold and brave decision we had to work well as team to achieve what we wanted in the time scale that we had.  We decided that we were going to create trousers based on the shape of clown trousers and then an oversized shirt to sit over the top of it. 

Here are some of our design ideas when draping our fabric on the stand

Lines of Enquiry- Colour and Design

After our colour palate not working very well I thought that we should change it to something that would be more suitable for printing. When I discussed this with the group they agreed and we decided to use brighter more acidic and childlike colours. This is our colour board which shows our final colour pallete.

After finalising our colour palette we started to source fabrics that we could use to print on in the print room based on the colours and what would work well with our designs. These are some of the designs that we created ready for the print room. 

We still haven't decided on what we wanted to create as a final garment although we all had a few different ideas. This made it difficult to find something that pleased every group member. initially we engineered our prints so that it would fit as panels in an A-line dress shape. As we started printing we realised this wasn't the direction we wanted to go in.

Lines of Enquiry- Print Room

Unfortunately I was unable to attend the session in which my group picked a colour pallete, which meant they had to make the decision without me. They chose soft pastel colours, which I initially liked and thought that they would bring a softer side to the theme in which we had chosen. Although having worked in the print room before using a pastel colour pallete I knew that it was going to be quite difficult to achieve the colours that we wanted because they were simply to pale. The first time we worked in the print room we worked with the hand painted reactive dyes which was a good experiment and showed us how difficult it was to create the pastel colours because when the fabric gets steamed the colours become even lighter.

This is our sample from the first print room session showing the outcome of our fabric. I was very disappointed with this as none of the colours came out because they were to pale. Unfortunately we will not be able to use this piece of fabric in our final garments, which we were hoping we would be able to due to the little time we have and the high demand for the print room. I think that our main problem we will have throughout the project will be a lack of time.

Lines of Enquiry- SWOT Analysis

In Tuesday’s session as a group we laid out all of our work and visual research onto the table to create a mood board so other groups could see what we were doing. From this we did a SWOT analysis. This helped us see our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and our threats. As a group we reviewed another groups work against the same criteria as this to help them see what they needed to do next. I think that doing this task I learned a lot because I could have a look at what other groups were doing which gave us some indication of how well we were working. Also marking another group’s work made me think about things that I can apply to my own work to help me get a clearer idea. Receiving feedback on our work from another group really helped us because it gave us a clear indication of where we were going right and where we were going wrong. What we learned from this was that we had lots of visual imagery and drawn work but not a particularly clear route in which it was going to go, which I believe we already knew but if it was clear to other people then we knew we had to do something about this. We also participated in learning the stages of group work session where we could asses ourselves as a group to figure out what level we were working on. Personally I feel that in my group I am working 2/3 because although I feel we are all putting our ideas forward and are getting on well, I think that our communication skills could be a lot better with one another. I feel this may be because we aren’t confident enough yet but hopefully this will get better the more time we spend working together. What I have found really helpful in communicating with the group is the group message we created at the start of the project using Facebook. This enables us to discuss our ideas and work when we are not together at university.

This is the mood board we laid out for our SWOT Analysis

Lines of Enquiry- Motif Development

From looking at things like sideshows and the darker side of fairgrounds we each started producing our own designs and motifs ready to be transferred onto screen for printing with. Although I felt that we still did not have a solid direction that we all wanted to go in. Because of this I was slightly disappointed in my own designs because I did not have a clear idea of where the group as a whole wanted to take the theme. Also I think that this was because we were trying to do so much in such a short space of time. Here are some of the motifs i created for our screen.

On our main screen we combined al of our motifs and designs so that they would all fit and we could use them all for printing. On our smaller screen we decided that we were going to use a pattern or a mark that would act as a background for us to print on to. As we weren’t too sure what we wanted to do for this I suggested using Brusho paints. I have used this technique previously, which is why I thought that it would create some really interesting marks which is what we were looking for. Below are the 2 designs we chose and combined to use on our small screen.