The Weekend for Making

Saturday, Sunday and Mondays Work

[Fabrication and final designs]

After buying all my fabrics and getting my prints done I decided to start making. Combining the blanket type material with the orange mesh for the back and have the orange wool as the front. After making up the front panels and teh back panels and sewing them together I decided I wasn't happy with the materials; the orange was much too bright and where I had added in the pocket and hemmed the curved front panel, it no longer lay flat. However, even though the back flowed nicely, it didn't fit the image that I had in my head of what I wanted it to look like. So after careful consideration, seeing that I had much more fabric than I needed, I decided to start again.

This time, I used a muted multi-thread orange-brown wool and the navy denim for the back panels. I am extremely happy that I decided to start again as it looked so much better and I knew I wouldn't have been confident in my garments if I would have left them as they were. When altering my earlier jacket pattern I obviously forgot to make the sleeve hole larger because when I tried to sew it onto the jacket body it was much too large and my sewing looked really messy. To fix this (as I didn't want to re-cut any pieces) I measured the circumference of the sleeve hole and then the circumference of the top of the sleeve. I needed to remove a total of 9 inches from the sleeve, so to make sure it was neat and subtle I altered the seam to take out the unnecessary fabric. This worked really well and the sleeve fitted in completely flat.

[New and old fabrication, from sketchbook]

For future reference, the sleeves need to be better considered not only with circumference but with shape too. I always design an over-sized 'kimono-esque' style sleeve, but in future to push myself I should try new silhouettes and shapes. I took out the pattern magic series that was in the library and photocopied the most interesting patterns so I can reference them in the future if I desire. As I struggled so much with these sleeves, I also photocopied a few pattern books on sleeves and how to create various shapes with sleeves. Hopefully these will be useful for me with future projects and I won't make the same mistakes again. 

[Front and back of jacket garment]

Originally I designed the lumpy hole at the front to be 3Dimensional, and as you can see in the picture above I combined the mesh orange and blue organza to create this 3D shape. Although I liked the colour and movement of this combination, I felt the 3D aspect looked too comical, much like my first draft of the jacket. So knowing how much better I felt starting again with the jacket, I took out the mesh stuffing. As I did so, the hole went 'inside-out' and laid inside the panel (see middle picture above) as opposed to on the outside. I thought this looked much better and still gave this 'body deformity' look but in a more subtle, attractive way. Although it wasn't in my designs I decided to cut out holes into the back of the jacket to tie it in with the front. Using the same orange that I used in the front panels, I laid one circle perfectly flat and scrunched the other; a physical representation of the 'designer baby' and the juxtaposition of the 'undesigned deformed baby'. 

The crop top initially should have been the easiest piece to make of the three garments, but down to fabric choice and possible lack of concentration, it proved to be harder than I thought. After sewing it wrong side out, I re-cut and sewed another top the right sides out which was okay. Not as neat as I hoped it would be but the fabric was really uncooperative. 

The final garment; the culottes, I only had to make once *cheers*. Working with the white trill was very easy, it sewed well and draped with just the right amount of structure. After practicing about 10 times sewing a zip into trousers on my toile, I attached a zip neatly into the final pair which I was extremely proud of. 

[Fabric paint and digital print samples]

After spending a considerable amount of time on the other two garments I was quickly running out of time to finish these culottes. So collecting my fabric paint samples I decided to jump right in and being painting it. I knew the paint needed at least 12 hours to dry so I couldn't waste anymore time sampling. I was actually really please with how the three garments came out and although I was slightly pushed for time at the end I don't think I needed more than three days. Perhaps with better organisation with fabric buying and digital printing the making would have gone smoother, but I felt I've self taught a lot over the weekend and definitely learnt from my many mistakes.