And our next brief is..

..Textiles! We've finally handed in our styling brief and are moving straight onto our next, which is a textiles brief. I'm going to do a brief blog post on what exactly textiles is and consists of, as personally I'm not overly knowledgable on textiles as a whole.

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Okay so I've basically found out that a textile or cloth is a flexible woven material consisting of a network of  natural or artificial fibres often refereed to as a thread or yarn.

Textiles are formed by weaving, knotting, knitting or crocheting fabrics together.

Textiles are used for a variety of things such as clothing, furniture, carpeting, handkerchiefs, kites, sails and parachutes. On the clothing side of things its used by a few famous designers such as Armani, the late Gianni Versace and Emilio Pucci all use textiles and a lot of the time designers such as these use textiles in order to differentiate their collections from other designers and make them more original and recognisable.

 EMILIO PUCCI

 ARMANI

VERSACE

I think the prints and the woven patterns on textiles are beautiful and really interesting. I like the fact that you can put your own creativity and personality into the patterns and colours and I will definitely be taking my colour psychology knowledge from my previous brief into this textiles one. I'll let you no how it goes when I get my brief on monday!

FINAL RECREATION!

Okay so I've finally finished my final recreation, and I've got to say I'm so happy with it! I was worried at how it would turn out but it looks pretty similar to its original, so I'm happy :)

After all the initial planning I finally shot my photos last Monday, I'm glad i got it out the way asap as well because its given me time to really look through all the photos and edit them if needed.

Here's the original;

And here's my recreation :) !;

I'm really pleased with the final image! As you can see here, well hopefully you can't really tell but I've used a bed sheet to recreate the dress and that was what i was worrying about the most. I couldn't find a dress that draped as well as in the picture and I had to consider colour and material as well, so after looking EVERYWHERE I decided to go for a HUGE double bed sheet as I'd have loads of material to work with and  it was also the same colour, so I draped it around my model and pinned it into place.

Another obstacle was the white cloth. It doesn't look great in my recreation and if I were to do it again I would have probably spent more time on getting it right, because in the original image its shaped a lot different and it was hard to get it right, also the pose was so hard to recreate, the way the right arm/elbow was positioned and in relation to the white cloth just couldn't be done by any of us so I think the way it was painted the right arm was lengthened slightly, or well it was a very awkward pose so that was tricky.

The hair and makeup went very well indeed and I'm pleased with both, I also love the lighting and think our photographer did an amazing job with that! Ive had a closer look and also notice a safety pin on the bed sheet.. oops! Big mistake, the picture has already been edited so when i learn to actually use photo shop I'll be sure to edit that out!

All in all I'm really pleased with the result and think it went great :) ! I enjoyed this shoot more than the others because the other 2 we did felt a lot more amateur as they weren't done in a lighting studio like this one, but actually dressing the model and tweaking the hair and dress etc on set was a lot of fun and i loved working with a photographer, it gave me more of an insight into what styling would really be like in the real world :)

Maxi skirt making..

So I've FINALLY completed my maxi skirt, and I'm going to put a bit of a step by step guide on here to recap on what i did! I reckon the overall skirt turned out quite well :) so here how i did it..

Firstly we had to cut out the patterns, this was quite tricky as we learnt a fair few new things we haven't done before in any of the other patterns, like adding length to the skirt for instance to make it a maxi.

We did this by tracing out our blocks onto a sheet of plain white patterning paper, and then we measured from our waist to our feet and added that length in cm onto the bottom of our skirt patterns. We also learnt how to add a waistband.

We did this by firstly deciding how thick we wanted it to be and i chose around 3 cm, we had to make sure it matched the length of our skirts around the top and then we also added a button stand onto the end and put a 1.5 seam allowance around it,

We also learnt how to add extra flare to the skirt. We did this by extending from the hip line to the bottom of the skirt on the front and the back piece by 2.5 cm,

1. Firstly, I cut out all my pattern pieces from my piece of fabric, BUT, this maxi is cut on the bias, which basically means its cut against the grain and diagonal rather than straight. We had to lay out our material and then fold it diagonally and lay out our patterns and cut them out.

2. I over locked the sides of the front and back part of the maxi and put the zip onto the left side, i then sewed each side together with a 1.5 seam allowance, over locked the seam allowance and then over locked all along the bottom of the skirt.

3. I then turned the hem up, I had quite a bit of trouble with this as it was very fiddly! I had to turn the skirt inside out and then iron only the over locking upwards, this was what I found difficult as it was so fiddley and you had to be very accurate, I then had to turn it up again and iron that down. You have to make sure you get it as even as possible so that when you sew it you don't miss any of the hem. You ahve to make sure you don't turn the hem up too much as because the maxi skirt is cut on the bias, its a more rounder shape rather than a straighter shape therefore it won't sit right if you turn up the hem too much and sits and looks a lot better and doesn't lose too much length is you only turn up the over locking.

4. You then need to sew along the hem as close as you can to the edge so that your sewing through the over locking, this is tricky and it took me a few goes to do this, and even though i had sewn my line straight all the way around the skirt, it had still gone off a bit as my ironing wasn't perfect, but it still looked okay.

                                                                                hem

5. Now i had to do the waistband, this was very complicated but i found it easier to do than the hem. You have to get your waistband you cut out and faced, and fold down 1.5cm all the way along and iron it.

     waistband

                                                                  front of waistband pinned

top stitching of waistband

6. I then had to find the middle of the waistband, the middle of the skirt and then the 'middle of the middle' as I said to help remember it! I pinned it to the top of my skirt and topstitched it on. I then had to stitch very neatly along the waistband very slowly.

7. Then I had to do the button hole using the memory craft machine like i did last time, I picked out a dark button to use and the memory craft created a button hole, I then stitched the button and and i was done!

Shirt Patterns

Yesterday in pattern cutting, we completed our patterns for our shirts. It was complicated to say the least, but weve done sooo many patterns now that if we all do it step by step, its a pretty easy process! I'll upload some of the photos now of my first draft, adaptations and final patterns!

First draft

First draft #2

Adaptations

adaptations and final pattern of collar

adaptations and final pattern of collar

adaptation

Final pattern

Were going to start our shirts next weeks and i cant wait! I reckon its going to be tough, but im looking forward to putting together piece by piece my very own shirt, I hope it goes well! Will update next week on how the first day of shirt making went x

Final shoot!

So we did our final recreation shoots yesterday! The photo i chose to create was dali's;

 'figure at a table'

Was well pleased with how the shoot went! To get the draping effect of the blue dress, i just bought a bouble sized bed sheet and draped it around my model and pinned it into place, it actually worked and looked quite effective! The hair and makeup went well also, and although ive only seen the images on the camera, they looked pretty close to origional shot so hopefully when theyve had a bit of editing theyll look a lot better on the computer! FINGERS CROSSED!