Frida Development

[Frida Kahlo research page]

After moving quite far away from my initial concept, I decided to bring back in the pregnancy and child concept. Frida Kahlo seemed the obvious choice for inspiration, and the colours she used fitted well within my colour palette. Frida was involved in a horrific car accident that left her unable to conceive which is reflected a lot in her work. Themes of pregnant women, disfigured 'wombs' and children fill her paintings. I particularly liked this painting of her with the metal pole going through, I responded to it in a 'gaping hole' where the womb would be; a lack of pregnancy. Developing this idea through textiles like knitting worked well, adding ladders and lace holes produced a sort of destroyed lace appearance.

[Stand work]

Translating this into stand work was actually quite difficult, I used my earliest research from the Tate, Time- Conflict Exhibition for shape influence, and cut out a selection of shapes and roughly sewed them together. After my development research of Frida Kahlo, I wanted to incorporate the pregnant belly, but as well as the obvious placing of the stomach I played around to see what it would look like as a sleeve, shoulder, or even collar piece. Although the results were interesting and progressed my designs into new silhouettes, I still felt that the stand work was very basic, draping helps initial designs but it wasn't realistic enough to be converted into a garment, something I hope to work towards in the weeks ahead. This combination of shapes inspired me to start combining materials, although the two colours I used were not relevant the balance of heavy 'leather' with the soft folds of the organza I really liked. Once I have more designs, and have more fabric swatches I will continue to combine and sew together materials that don't compliment each other. 

[Cabbage dying the knit]

The only knit colours that were available were of that off-white/beige which obviously wasn't part of my palette so I decided to try out a method of natural dye; red cabbage. It created the most beautiful deep blue water, but unfortunately it only dyed the wool a lilac colour. However, although not the colour I was hoping for I actually really like it, and will go on to dye my final knit sample in this method. I think through increasing the amount of red cabbage the more intense the colour may be. Through researching it, onion skins produce a burnt yellow/orange colour, however seeing samples of this I feel it might be too yellow and faint.