Archive Collection - week 3

Sample making and experimentation

This week I have started sample making. After merging and exaggerating my sketchbook drawings from the summer project in adobe photoshop and illustrator, I have started to work with different fabric pieces.

For this project, I have decided to keep my fabric selection smooth and flawless. I wanted to choose my fabrics which are light weighted and little flurry. The reason I want to use these type of fabrics is to describe the movement of a dress, while a person(who wears it) moves. Therefore I had decided to choose fabrics like velvets and silks.

Also, I found my colour pallet a bit conservative and,  while experimenting with different colours, I found accidental colours more pretty than my actual colour pallet. Therefore, I had decided to go with varieties of colours which are in my sketchbook as well, that is how I would have a range of colours to experiment around.  (colour swatches image to be added)

I had made some sublimation prints because I thought that would be a quick process to get my patterns onto the fabric, but I did not find it challenging for myself and through sublimation prints, I am also losing the crispness of my drawings, therefore I might use industrial machines to hight light the details of my sample in future.

An example is shown down below:

I have printed this onto silk polyester fabric name) fabric because I was looking into Ali Zeeshan's wedding collection and have seen his collections, which was made out of heavyweight and with the combination of light weighted fabrics, which was exquisite. I loved the way he has used simple printed patterns and embroidery pattern with a lot of negative space onto a fabric. Therefore I have started to make my sample by using printing and embroidery techniques.

This sample has a busy background, therefore instead of exaggerating the pattern at the back, I should have a plain and clean background to highlight and attract the main pattern.

In addition, I have made another sample (shown at the right).

For this sample, I have used sublimation print again because I wanted to have an accurate pattern and colour. Then, I have used pfaff machine to do embroidery over it. This is an unsuccessful piece because my embroidery pattern was really intricate for the machine to pick up the small details, therefore I thought of using ethos machine to get all the details beautifully onto the fabric. In addition to this, during my tutorial, I have got some suggestions of maybe using coaching technique to make the stems of the flowers and using fabrics as threads to hand embroidery the tiny flowers. Therefore, for the next time, I will be elaborating my samples more by increasing the use of hand stitches and Juki machine.

Overall, I feel like my samples are not really complimenting the main theme of wedding embroidery, therefore I think I should start using hand embroidery quite or embellishment work more. I might make new samples, but I think I can still develop into these samples to make then richer in colour and texture. I should be using different proportions of the stitches and play around a bit more with rich colours.