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