Evaluation

     After feedback with Juliana it was great to hear that she could see how well we have all worked as a group from our collaborative work but also through our individual sketchbooks. Within her feedback she expressed how well we had all worked with the same theme throughout and our research was very clear within every group member. We were very pleased to hear that she chose our group as the winners allowing us to further develop our designs into a reality; through her help we have decided to produce a bag/backpack design using both found fabrics and our own textiles.

I think the strength of our group work is really high since we have all got on really well together and hope to continue to collaborate in the future. This unit has been really helpful to us all to learn how the other works and to take certain elements from fashion or textiles to use in our own personal developments next year. I hope that in our final year I can design some samples for one of the fashion students to potentially use in their collection since I think this would be a great experience for each of us. What I most admired about my group was that everyone naturally found their role within the project from start to finish and took initiative when it was necessary. I believe there was no weak link and would highly commend every member of the group. An improvement we could have made would have been within the group file and pdf; to reconsider the quantities of each peoples work within these documents. I think we could have had more of a balance of each person’s work to better represent our progress.

In terms of personal development I think I have realised that I am definitely a textiles designer as opposed to a fashion designer, but have thoroughly enjoyed learning about how the fashion students work. Since I design for fashion it has been a great insight for me to see how my fabrics would work within a collection and I plan to definitely use this information in the future. The difference between textiles and fashion is bigger than I thought and are definitely different in terms of feedback. I feel as though sometimes the textiles tutors can be too nice about their feedback so having harsher and potentially more truthful feedback has been very helpful. Since I know that once I work in industry there will be times when this happens, I’m glad I am being prepared for it now through the fashion tutors feedback. In terms of weaving I don’t feel like I have pushed myself technically but due to the time constraints I knew this wouldn’t have progressed much anyway. However I think my use of colour has continued to improve throughout the unit. Experimenting with colours has been very important to me since I started university. Through collaborating we ended up with a colour palette I normally wouldn’t have picked myself which has been a great challenge for me to see how I coped with it.

Overall I have thoroughly enjoyed this unit and am very excited at the prospect of continuing to work with my group next year. I have made great friends and strong connections and couldn’t have selected a better group to work with.

Mon 7^th – Tue 15^th May, 2018

                At the beginning of the week, I focused on trying to finish off my weaving as quickly as possible due to time constraints. Although I knew these were an issue I was worried about completing all the weaving I had planned in time. Luckily, everything was finished and the new samples I had made were a nice contrast and very uplifting in colour compared to my earlier ones. I also worked with an idea of floats as a way to attach things (ideally bags) to a garment using these floats. They have since proved very popular and if I had more time, I would have liked to develop this further in other colourways.

                Mid-week, once the line-up was compiled together and finished by the fashion students, we all began to colour block the designs using our own styles. After we had all contributed and brought our ideas together, it was decided that my designs were the strongest and best showed our textile samples on the garments. Therefore I then spent the next two days painting these out for our final line up ready for the exhibition the following Friday. We all agreed that the techniques I was using really made the line up much stronger and complimented Claudia’s illustrations really well.  In addition to this, we tried to include everyone’s textile samples in the best way possible without overloading the collection with pattern, with serious consideration to placement and colour based on our research and progress.

                A big element of textiles for me is through lots of drawing and mark making and is something I consider to play a big factor into my personal development. I have found that I have neglected it more than usual within this brief and so have tried to be aware of this and bring it back when appropriate.

Mon 30^th April – Fri 4^th May, 2018

                I began the week by planning the new colour combination for my warp. Some of Claudia’s research about glass really stood out to me with the colours she found in a fabric that mimicked glass characteristics. I decided to use these colours to influence my design since they were much brighter and a nice contrast to my previous warp. I decided on a bright orange being the main colour which should really lift all my weft colours and create more of a pop of colour throughout each sample. Making the warp and knotting it on took two full days and although time consuming, I think will work really well with our other samples and add a nice bright element. By the end of the week I had chance to do some samples and have also done some small samples in some solid colours to add some relief to our textile collection as a whole. Within the group everything is very heavy in pattern and colour so some areas of plain colours should complement nicely when getting these textile samples onto our final line up.

                On Friday we spent the entire morning working really well as a group on our group file and our textile book. We managed to delegate jobs within the group so that we worked on both at the same time and made a lot of progress with both areas. Both files are almost complete but the bulk of the work on each is done. We also discussed perhaps presenting our portfolio in a concertina style to clearly see the flow of our progress on this unit.

Mon 23^rd – Fri 27^th April, 2018

                After feeling a bit stuck with where to take my samples I had a quick tutorial with Lesley (weave tutor) just to get a bit of direction for where to move my samples on to. She pointed out all the elements that are already in my sketchbook that I needed to extract and turn into different weave structures. Most of these ideas came from my most recent digital designs that I created over Easter. Looking at the use of colour and layering of the motifs, we noticed that some areas could represent paper or Antara yarn which has a slightly softer edge to it. In addition to this a lot of the drawings started to suggest floats that could be used over my blocks on my warp. Starting to unpick my digital print designs in a new way helped me move my samples on a lot more and helped to add more texture and another dimension. This compiled with my tartan/check designs worked really well and I hope to continue to develop this into next week.

     I have noticed that my warp is beginning to run out. With the deadline still being a few weeks away I have planned on making a new warp so I can continue to weave a develop my samples further since I still feel that there is necessary development to happen with them. Although doing this may push me for time (since making a new warp will take around 2 full days) I still feel that it is the best choice to make. It will also allow me to change the colours of my warp to play around with our colour scheme more and perhaps attempt something brighter in contrast to my current dark warp.

       New Warp Ideas

                As a group this week we have had a strong focus on our group file and were adamant to finish a big chunk of it since we understand the importance of it. We also knew this had to be a full group effort so all tried to be together as much as possible to work on it. I feel as though we have made some big steps with it and will continue to do so next week. We also spent a lot of time developing our presentation up to a better standard which we believe is now more representative of our best work as a group. This week we also got the chance to see Julianna and she could see where we were up to. She seemed very impressed with the work we had done so far and suggested that our next step was to filter through our samples to pick out the best ones and do a pin up with these with our most recent designs to see how everything worked together. 

Mon 16^th – Fri 20^th April, 2018

     The priority after Easter was to focus on my weaving and creating samples. After trying to plan sample design over Easter and not having much luck, I decided to try just working with tartan designs first rather than trying to incorporate too many elements with my blocks (threading up plan). The tartan designs I planned all ended up quite busy with lots of stripes. Although these look really nice and represent my drawings well (which inspired my samples) I think it would be nice to have some plainer or more simple ones as a comparison. It will also be interesting to see how this works with my warp since that on its own is extremely busy. I have found planning the plainer samples more difficult – I think the best way to try and move forward with them would be to do more drawings from our primary research and see if these can help to influence in any way. I do however feel as though I am working well with our colour palette in terms of my warp. In addition to this I started to test some gingham weft ideas which unfortunately haven’t turned out very nicely and I probably won’t use but was worth trying to see if it complimented my warp.  Next week I hope to continue with the more simple designs and test some thicker yarns to see if it works with my warp or if they will look to chunky – I definitely feel I’m at a point where I need to become more experimental with my weft.

Easter Holidays

     Over the Easter holidays I wanted to focus my time on drawing, sample ideas and garment designs. I started off with the drawing element as I feel that it has been lacking in the past few weeks. I began with digital drawing, using motifs from early on in my research that I had yet to use. Since all the motifs are from areas of Nigeria, the digital designs I made looked a lot like Nigerian textiles when combined with our new colour scheme which is more vivid. It is good to see clearly that when all research is combined into designing, the outcome is clearly showing where our ideas have come from and representing them in our work. In terms of physical drawings, I decided to start with watercolours; focusing on the patterns of the military wear garments we have photographed. After painting those out in our colour scheme I picked out rectangular shapes to overlap. I think they could be really helpful when developing my sample ideas for weaving so hope to do more of this throughout the project.

                After trying to create sample ideas from my drawings, I found that none of them looked particularly nice or represented my work/ research very well. I found it really difficult to try and create anything since everything looks slightly different once woven anyway. I decided that it would be best to wait until I had access to my loom again so that I could test some ideas before designing. However, I did manage to test colours that would work well with my warp and tried various proportions of them to see which looked best.

                When starting to design garments I was a bit unsure of where to start. I therefore made a mood board of military wear and school uniforms to see what elements of our research I could pick out to start designing. I noticed a lot of shirts and skirts so decided to design 10 each of those alongside 5 head scarves. I think the headscarves are crucial to our designing alongside maybe hoods as a way to expand. I also think we may have to consider modesty with a lot of the designs and how much the body is covering different areas.

Mon 19^th – Fri 23^rd March, 2018

     After viewing our colour palette in comparison to our research, it was evident that the two didn’t really match up. Our colour palette was much duller and a bit too ‘country side’ compared to our research which had lots of bright and more playful colours. Therefore we picked out the best colour options and almost combined the two together to make sure our colour palette was more representative.

                After doing this I could really play with the colours for my warp ideas. By using the new colour palette I was able to create much more exciting possibilities for a warp that linked better to our research of military wear and school uniforms. The main colour I chose for my warp is quite dark and I am worried that later down the line this may become a problem. I am afraid it may compromise the variation I can have in my samples, causing lighter colours to become too dull. However, it fits with our theme and key research points that we have developed as a group; hopefully I can play around with it enough to get some samples that complement each other and the research. I have made lots of progress with my warp and managed to get it all threaded up and weaving before the Easter holiday which was much further along than I expected. This allows me to spend Easter developing sample ideas to weave when I’m back.

                The workshop this week was extremely helpful for me to understand the outcome of this project, and how to effectively work towards it. By unpicking a designer’s collection I could clearly see all the elements of a garment that need to be thought about. I can now use this information to help me design both garments and textile samples in the best way for our collection. I was surprised to see just how much there was to think about. Although I knew all of the functional elements and other areas were already there, I hadn’t really noticed them before in terms of a design aspect – or thought about where they might have come from. I found the exercise extremely useful and plan to use it to help me design.

Mon 12^th – Fri 16^th March, 2018

     Recently I feel as though I have been slightly neglecting textiles in favour of learning how fashion works and the new elements of fashion to learn. Although this has been highly enjoyable and I plan on carrying these new skills with me in the future, I wanted to come back to working how I know by solely thinking about textile design and my weaving. Since weaving needs so much attention before the sampling can even start I began the week by planning my warp and how I can best represent the research my group has conducted within it. With a warp being such a permanent thing I struggled with how I might incorporate our 2 main areas; school uniform and military uniform. Hopefully with the help of my group I can make an informed decision that best suits where our research and designing is headed.

                As a group we compiled our current samples together to drape them on the stand. This was highly informative for me to see how fashion works and where their ideas come from. It was also very useful to see if our samples worked together and showed where our ideas have come from. I was very pleased with the outcome of all areas and think we have managed to sample together well as a team. It is vital that even at these early stages everything coordinates. Our next step from here would be to refine our samples and give them a higher end aesthetic and consider how they would fit into developed garment designs.

                The workshops have been very useful to me, coming from textiles. With fashion being quite alien, learning an entirely new way of working in a few weeks has been challenging – however the workshops on garment design have been highly insightful. From these workshops I am now aware of all the different areas of a garment I need to focus on and what to look for/pick out of my research in order to inform those decisions. In addition to this I feel more confident in drawing those garments and how they can be adapted to work as a collection.

Print Workshop

                I found the print workshop to be really useful. During the session, by beginning with looking at everybody’s research all together, it was clear to see that as a group we were heading in the right direction with our concept.  From that, I found an image that I hadn’t yet responded too which I found linked well with what the rest of my group was also looking into. Having the time to sit there and really focus on unpicking the photo was very useful and a skill that I hope to develop and carry forward through the project. Unfortunately when the workshop was over and I came back to my responses, I didn’t feel as though I had captured the image very well, but the process in which it was done has allowed me to properly think about how to reflect on my research.

                Throughout I was still trying to keep to my style and way of working, which I found to be quite successful. I was trying not to get too in my own head about it and trying to adopt a new style of drawing within this process may have done that. That being said, what I did produce could definitely be pushed more in a variety of ways including media. I hope to continue with this later on in the project to continue reflecting and responding to my research.

 

Tues 6^th – Fri 9^th March, 2018

     This week has had a strong focus on research. To begin a project on such a serious issue, we knew as a group that we needed to have as much information as possible on the areas of human trafficking we have chosen to look into. As each of us have been investigating, we found we have focused more on the Nigerian school girls than Stella’s Voice. However having both areas for research, it allows us to have a positive and negative region to look into. Within the stories of the Nigerian school girls, each of us have taken the issue in a slightly different way; allowing us to focus on different parts and have a broader knowledge of what happened.  In turn, this enables us to branch out into different areas of textiles and fashion to find what suits us best for this unit.

 

 

                I have found working this week quite difficult. Learning to work in a way that is out of my comfort zone and at a speed that is at a much faster pace for me has been challenging to tackle. Working with my group has really helped to make this easier. Seeing how the fashion students work is making it easier to understand where I might be going wrong from a fashion perspective. However juggling fashion work and textiles at the same time is so far proving to be very challenging. I hope that as the unit goes on and I settle into the work this will become easier.

 

 

Project Launch

     During the project launch for Unit X – Rebel Tartan, my group and I began to discuss how we wanted to link our work to the Blue Heart Tartan and the areas of human trafficking that we wanted to explore. We came to the conclusion to focus on two areas: a charity called ‘Stella’s Voice’ and an incident 4 years ago where 276 Nigerian school girls were kidnapped. Through both areas we can explore the negative implications that human trafficking has on the lives of innocent children, but also how they can be saved from such devastating people.

 

                We began, by focusing on the starting points we had, to create a colour palette. This was vital for me as a weaver so I was glad we could decide as a group which palette worked for us. By pulling colours from the Stella’s Voice website, this gave us a base for a colour palette which may change as we move forward. We thought that the palette might be a little too dull but won’t be sure until we begin to work with it. Our next step is to gather as much research as possible to share as a group at our next meeting.