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.