Unit X | Fabric Sourcing and Emboridery

This week we sourced our fabrics in order to prepare them for sampling. We decided to stay experimental with our fabrics and give ourselves a lot to work with. I went for a range of cottons and silks, both light and heavy weight.
We attempted to source outside of the universities resources and visited Bennett Silks. A few fabrics took our interest but the prices were around £23-£28 a metre, which on a student budget isn't very economical. In the end most of our fabrics came from the MMU fabric store, with the exception of a few online buys and some sourced from fabric shops in the city centre.
We dyed the fabrics different grey shades to keep with our colour palette.

Me and Nicole also sorted out our screens for the print room and booked some space. Unfortunately the print room can get very busy and is often fully booked, so to prevent people being left with no time there is a new rule for this unit where you can only book two days per week. Because of this, I will need some other form of sampling to experiment with as my time printing will be really limited.

Another specialism I have been mixing with print is embroidery. I thought I could develop the embroidery skills I already have in both machine and hand. I started by pin tucking different fabrics with different needle sizes, and also layering fabrics together to see what texture was created. I think they turned out well and they relate to the bandage drawings I have chosen to screen print. I plan to incorporate the two mediums together and possibly pin-tuck a screen print or print on top of some embroidery. 

Intentions | Consumer

The whole way through this unit I thought that my work was aimed at high street stores like Topshop, River Island, Urban Outfitters etc. Now that I have my collection and it has been refined several times, it looks more like the higher end of high street. For example Whistles, Cos, Reiss, Zara or & Other Stories.

Although my designs are still classified as high street the consumer will be a lot different than it was previously. It is more likely to be someone with more money to spend at their leisure and someone a little less grungy than I thought before. My prints themselves have a grungy feel to them but because of the processes I've put them through, the garments I have chosen to put them on and the fabrics I have printed them on they have become more polished.

I have digitally printed my final collection on a thin silk Habotai and an optic Cotton. I chose which print should go on which fabric based on what it is used for on the final designs. I spent some time in the studio today pinning onto a mannequin to see what the garments might look like physically, seeing how they might drape etc. Overall I am really satisfied, however there were two prints which I feel should be in different fabric.
I sent these off to be printed in the more expensive silk Crep de Chine that I used previously in the project. I thought that this would be too expensive for the audience I am going for but now that I am aiming for higher end high street the price is less of an issue. 

Pinning my designs onto a mannequin has really helped me to visualise what my prints would looks like as actual products, and I am happy with what I have produced for this unit.

Intentions | Direction

One of the main criteria of this unit is to think about your work, its purpose and audience. I am really interested in printing for fashion, I know that almost for sure. However I have never thought about whether I want to go in the direction of high end fashion or high street.

I have thought about it a lot in the last few days and I came to my own conclusion. I thought about how I would feel seeing my work on a catwalk, and as proud and incredible that would be I realised I would get more of a buzz from seeing a regular person wearing my prints in the street. Obviously this makes me want to design for high street fashion, for example retailers like Topshop, H&M and Urban Outfitters. I've realised the 'dream' is to have my designs available to the average person like myself, and to remain affordable.

I did some research on high street clothing and their materials. I found that high street clothing is largely made up of polyester and cotton. The fabrics used on the high street need to be cheap, fast and easily accessible. Due to this I had my first set of digital prints done on a Cotton Voile. I also had a set of prints done on Crepe de Chine, which is a silk that is a little more expensive. I chose this because the example fabric showed that the colours come out vibrant and opaque, whereas the cotton provides more of a translucent print. It will be interesting to see how the two fabrics produce the same print designs.

I also took a look at WGSN to see what kind of fabrics are set to be used in upcoming trends. I found that a lot of S/S15 predictions make use of sheer fabrics along with opaques. I like this trend and it is totally adaptable to high street fashion. I like the idea of an opaque dress with sheer sleeves or sheer sectioning…

Print | Week 8

In the final week of print I finally have a set of designs that are complete and can be seen as a collection. When I was making my final touches I felt like some of the designs weren't finished or didn't look good enough. Rachel showed us how to finish our samples with bondaweb which got me thinking about using bondaweb to glue different fabrics onto my designs. 

I decided to use lace cut into circles, which I think works really well. The circles draw attention like Karen Scott and the use of lace looks similar to things I have created in photoshop using the selection tool.

I also decided to create some small practice pouches using two of my prints to demonstrate where I see my designs going. I wrote earlier in my book about Paperchase and how their stationary products are the type of thing I see my work turning into. I am really happy with how they look and although they are very rough copies and only took 20 minutes to create, they still represent my ideas successfully.

Print | Week 5

I worked in the print room quite a bit this week. I began to dye my fabric using the vats to see which colours I want to work on. I decided to try and create a vast amount of colours from my colour image and test all of them to see which ones I want to use. In the end I had colours ranging from dark blue to light peachy-oranges. I was quite happy with the colours, although the yellow was far too bright so I decided not to work with that one.

 I have also noticed that n Beatriz Millhazes work the background colours tend to be more subtle and the colour is in the design on top. I kept my backgrounds toned down but without banishing colour completely.

The first two sessions I've had in the print room were very much just testing sessions. I wanted to see what the pigment colours looked like on the coloured fabrics and how well they worked. I learnt a lot by testing things out, I now only want to dye fabrics subtle blues and oranges then dye onto them to create the other colours in my colour image. I feel this will help make the colour mood better as blue and orange are the most used colours in my image.