Research

I am interested in creating dresses using pleating, smocking, and other forms of manipulation. This is quite a strong trend this season.
Here is a selection of garments using these techniques:





I love this dress from Bottega Veneta S/S '07. It uses smocking in a really contemporary way, completely manipulating the fabric, it has a purpose rather than being a decoration.

Week Six. 26th March.

I was keen to continue with experimenting how I could use my fabrics, and as the print room was closed this week, it was a good time to work on them. After doing testers on smaller pieces of fabric I decided to iron pleats into a large sample and begin smocking it. The pleats were not all even, and whilst this is a sample and not of utmost important, I would not like this to be the case again, so after the easter break I will look into steam pleating using structered stencils to create even, perfect pleats.

I scanned the fabric in to create some repeat patterns.







Some of the small sections created really nice imagery:





Which are somewhat reminiscant of Geogia O'keefe's work:





Even though I had printed some digital pieces that did not entirely work, I was still keen to pursue digital repeat work, Which I think could very well have a place within this work:

Week Five. 17th March.

As the print room was so quiet this week, I was able to print and steam four large lengths of fabric. With these I began to pin dress shapes on a mannequin to get an idea of how to use these fabrics. I liked the first shape, the use of quite intricate pleats gave a lovely shape to the garment, but I was not too keen on the print itself: it ended up looking like a very colourful zebra print.









However, I was happy with the dress shape: the pattern can be rectified, as a tester this was successful.

I bought some embroidery threads, I was keen to buy undyed threads and dye them myself, but then I found some lovely, almost metallic threads which worked beautifully with the design. I began to hand embroider a pattern onto the bust of the dress shape. This was sucessful and I was also happy because it is a way of including a more structured pattern into these prints, without it looking forced or unnatural.

Week Four. 10th March.

After creating some smaller samples and deciding that the colours worked well, I started to print larger (A1-A0) fabric samples. This was so I could begin pinning on a mannequin to get an idea of how to develop these fabrics.

I was also keen to explore fabric manipulation within my printing and so began manipulating fabric before printing, by scrunching it and fising it under the heat press, or pleating the fabric. I then printed on top of these and opened them up when they had been printed upon. I liked this technique, but was not sure whether it was suitable for me:



I also began to work with Direct dyes, I pleated and rolled three pieces of fabric and then dip-dyed them:

I also solidly dyed three pieces of fabric, which I then used discharge upon and then printed using the acid dyes. Again I liked this technique, but was not sure whether it was suitable for my work:

To further my experiments with fabric manipulation i used one of the dip-dyed fabrics (habotai) and using a screen with the imag of the scanned fabric that looks like a net, I printed Puff binder onto the reverse. When I ironed this I hoped that the strength of the binder with the light-weight of the fabric would cause the fabric to be manipulated, but this did not happen. Although I was quite excited about the possibility of this working, I also like the effect of hand manipulation on the fabric, and so do not feel that this needs to be changed.

Week Three. 3rd March.

I wanted see whether my CAD images would work as digital prints, and although I was not entirely happy with the colours of the designs, I decided to print two of them digitally, onto velvet as testers: to see both on an alternative fabric and how these could be manipulated after printing. However, despite colour matching, the colours came out completely differently to those on the designs- the pinks were bright and lurid, and the greens and blues were dull and grey. Although these did not work, and I was not keen on the idea of using velvet, I am glad I did these testers now. I still have the option of using digital print in this way, but at this moment I will concentrate on direct printing, fabric manipulation and embroidery.

I finalised my colour pallette:



And remixed my Acid dyes to replace the initial ones.



I strted printing with these, keen to use "skyscapes" as references for printing. In my colour pallette I have a very bright orange which I was quite unsure about using, as it is such a strong colour. However, I realised that without it my colour pallette would not work and would once again be flat.

Using the image of the sky I had previously, I inverted the colours:



Here are some of the initial prints I did with the newly mised dyes:









I was keen to continue with fabric manipulation and after completing a small tester of smocking on plain silk, I scanned the fabric. The patterns created from the stretched fabric were very interesting, and I was keen to pursue these:









This final image relates to some of the imagery I collected in Scarborough: