Editorial

The Kimono from my graduate collection was featured in an online editorial this week. Hope street magazine is a Glasgow based fashion and lifestyle magazine that thinks outside of the box. Much of their content breaks the convention of a fashion magazine, this is a magazine that is following it’s own rules.

The photoshoot was styled by Kristen Nellie and she was kind enough to send me a few more shots that didn’t make the cut. Kristen also graduated from DJCAD with a degree in textiles. Her specialism was knit and alongside her work at Hope street she also runs a knitwear brand called DIZY. It is definitely worth a look, she knits stunning scarves and skirts with quality yarns.

Instax

At the photoshoot for my graduate collection I had a few instant cameras to take pictures with, which I displayed in my degree show.

Graduate collection look book

Photographer – Kathryn Rattray (twisted flax)

Models – Jolene Guthrie, Joy Gansh, and Rachel McDermott

Degree show

My degree show space is all set up and ready to be assessed tomorrow morning. I will find out my results on the 20th of May, so it will be a nerve wracking time between now and then. It will be good to find out and then be able to relax! I honestly can’t believe that this is the end of my degree, it has come in so, so fast. It feels like just a few months ago that I moved to dundee from Glasgow, and now I am about to move back again.

Fourth year has definitely had it’s ups and downs. It has been both the best and worst year of my life. I actually came close to giving up, much to the dismay of my parents, but I am certainly glad I didn’t. I spent a large portion of my final semester procrastinating, which meant that the majority of my work was done in the last two months before hand in. Despite this I feel that my project came together quite well and am so very glad to be finished.

Translating designs onto the body

I have spent rather a lot of time thinking about different ways of translating my design work onto the body. Working with different scales within one outfit was an idea that I thought would balance out the multiple patterns that my garments are going to have. I also felt it would be good to have two garments that were more simple and two that were more of a statement so that fitted well with the scaling idea. Body suits have been in the back of my head for quite a while so those were what I settled on for the more understated items.

The movement of corals and other undersea foliage is a theme that I have tried to carry through my whole project so it was important for that to be present in the final outcome as well. I did a lot of research into current trends and found that some popular styles just now, which would fit in with this flowing idea, were wide leg trousers and circle skirts. I had originally settled on the skirt but changed my mind half way through the process as I felt the trousers would be more fitting.

My final, and really my main garment is a simple kimono. I have always been really interested in Japanese culture, a previous project of mine looked at the Japanese technique for mending broken ceramics – kintsukuroi. In Japan everything is reused and repurposed, with very little being thrown away. This recycling mentality is one that fits the ethos of my project quite well so that was kind of where the inspiration for the kimono came from.

I have never really done much in the way of fashion illustration, these were just quick sketches to get my ideas across to my seamstress. I also had absolutely no idea what I was doing with the measurements. They are not even all the same unit of measurement. Oops.

Digital design

It took quite a bit of time for me to get used to designing on the computer. It is so different to screen printing, largely because you can’t actually see the full design to scale and also because there is a bit of a difference between what is on screen to what comes out the printer. However, once you get the hang of it, it is super speedy. Another benefit is not being constantly covered in a rainbow of dyes.

I am enjoying working on the computer a lot and I am quite happy with the designs I have been creating. I have sent away small test swatches to several companies that produce digitally printed fabric so I am quite excited to see the results.

Digital sketching

After quite a while of being totally stuck I decided to mess around on photoshop to try and give myself some kind of direction. I have not done very much in the way of digital printing before. I decided to work in a kind of collage way, as if I was doing work in my sketchbook, to get started. The images I produced are by no means final design work, no where near it! But I feel that I have at least moved my ideas into a new direction, which hopefully will move me towards being unstuck.

I used scans of my sketchbook as well as photographs I had taken in the aquaria I visited earlier in the year. This was also an exercise to see what I could do with my drawings and photos. Experimenting with different ways of manipulating the images.

Cut outs

I have been somewhat lacking in inspiration since just before the christmas break. In an attempt to keep myself busy and also to try and spark some ideas I have been working on cut outs. I have produced an entire sketch book of little cut out sketches. It works nicely as a book as you can see the different coloured pages peeking through several pages. I am not sure how useful this experiment was but at least I wasn’t completely idle.

Fabric experiments

I started doing some initial experiments on a variety of fabrics, to see how I could use my motifs to create patterns. I was using exposed screens to print motifs in a variety of blue hues onto transparent fabrics (silk chiffon and cotton organdie). I wanted my sample to have a translucent quality so I could layer them up to emulate the depth in a coral reef. I felt having a lightweight, flowing fabric like chiffon agains a stiffer organdie would, again, mimic the coral reefs, which have a variety of lifeforms that all flow differently in the current. I also worked with some viscose velvet, using devore paste to create sections of translucency, again fitting in with this idea of creating depth and a variety of textures and qualities in my fabric samples.

SLAP! TACK! BANG!

Yesterday I hosted a fab event alongside Shauna McGregor. It was an interactive exhibi- tion come photo shoot. We borrowed clothes from local designers Hayley Scanlan and Kerrie ALDO, got Holly Scanlan on board to do hair, contacted a few of our model friends and asked Kathryn Rattray to take some photos. We had gold foil backgrounds, stacks of chairs, glitter, tinsel and a plastic flamingo to play with as well. One wall even had a mock washing line with huge white briefs that had ‘feminist’ screen printed in pearlescent pink on the back pegged to it.

We wanted to get people talking about what was going on at the time; we encouraged people to discuss the Ferguson shooting, recent bans on UK pornography and feminism. Using the stacks of old magazine we had left out, we wanted people to draw their thoughts out, stick up phrases, and make collages to illustrate what they had been talking about. We got some really good conversations going, as well as some interesting things happening on the wall.

The reason for the event was primarily research for our dissertations. I wanted find out how to get people engaged in conversation, I was trying to think of different ways to start conversations as well as thinking of new ways to record what people’s thoughts were. That is where the collaging idea came from, it kind of killed both birds with one stone, and also it was super fun. The other part the event played was producing images that we could include in our reports, we are both doing different modules, Shauna’s is about communication and media and mine is a business report. Both of them being about magazines, we felt it was important to make them look the part. My proposed magazine works on a multi platform blueprint, producing content through online channels, such as a website and social media. It would also put on events similar to this one, in order to engage readers in different ways.

I think the event, on the whole, was a success. We got a lot of positive feedback as well as all the interaction on the night. The two different things going on went quite well, but I feel they could have worked better as individual events; it was hard for us to facilitate both things at once. That is definitely something I will take forward into future event planning.