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.