Giles Deacon

Our next Pattern cutting project is to recreate Giles Deacon's 'The Troubadour' dress from his A/W 07 collection, we can adapt and use any material we like as long as it is quite strong and can hold a good shape. We have to follow the instruction and photograph the dress and update it onto showstudios.com website to be entered into the competition before the deadline which is slowly in sight, but here is where I'm up to so far. Next step the neck facing and the body panels but here is the original dress and what its suppose to look like.

My progress

Okay so I've finished all seven threads that link to the seven deadly sins and I am now onto creating textile samples of these sins, I am over half way through of the 7 samples but here are the ones I have completed so far and ill even talk you through them.. I know i'm so good :)

Sloth

This is a crazy textile sample where I just let my mind just go past the original plans, but basically for sloth I started of with dirty houses and piles of rubbish which lead me on to bin bags where I found a jacket that was pleated with bin bags.  

Gluttony

Okay for Gluttony I thought of addiction of Alcohol and wanting more and more of it and how over time the liver can be affected by the want for more. However for this textile sample I personally believe it needs improving and become stronger but I am still thinking of how I could do this. 

Pride

So for pride, I thought war, army and soldiers and how they fight and hide in trenches, which trenches reminded me of tunnels and train tracks which you can probably see in now how I thought of this textile sample. 

Anger!


My inspiration for this textile sample was the brain and  the three areas which the front area of the brain controls. Behaviour, Thinking and Emotion. All these area link to anger and then I put my ideas into what techniques I could used and I pretty much used up quite a few techniques, Furrowing, embroidery, applique and Shashiko.  

The Capital of England.. London!

 This wasn't the first time I had visited London, but it was the first time I had been with college and been and looked at places I was interested in and that applied to me. While I was in London we visited a numerous of places such as Liberty's (where I saw Mark Owen from Take That, it was amazing and so was the shop) Brick Lane ( amazing street art), Fabric shopping, and somerset house which I found so interesting and really opened up my eyes to the world of fashion and how much effort people put into being up to date with current trends! which gave me the opportunity to photograph peoples styles that caught my eye ( Also saw the Made in Chelsea cast) but over all I really enjoyed the trip and it gave me chance to see London in a different light instead of seeing it as a tourist location. Oh how could I forget the V&A that was a trip so many amazing things on show there. Anyway here are my photos that I would like to share with you... (sorry there late) 

I have a confession...

Ok so I have to confess and have to own up that I have been a really bad blogger lately and I apologise, but I have had technical problems with my blog and laptop (all fixed now) and also been tied up with all my college work which I will start to share with you soon, but where shall we start ? perhaps when I visited London last week?

Final sewing of the 60s dress

The neck facing was the final step of the dress! All I had to do was cut some interfacing out and iron onto the facing to make it stronger and more suitable for the dress, the next step of the facing was to over lock the out side of the facing and stitch the facings to the neck line remembering to put good sidedly together, once connecting the dress to the facing was done I had to press the facing down and stitch close to the neckline to secure the facing down. Then I was done the dress was completed and it was ready to be pressed and placed on a manikeen, and that's exactly what I did and here the finished 60s dress...

Attaching the pleats to the dress

By putting the right sides of the pleats and the dress together they just needed a simple 1cm seam allowance stitch around it and it's connected

Pleats!

Now to the pleats, firstly I had to match up the notches and press the pleats in place ready to stitch a straight line across the top to hold the pleats in place, I then had to connect the front and the back peice of the hem with a simple straight stitch

Side seams!

Connecting the dress together was a simple all I had to do was a simple straight stitch from the end of the sleeve to the bottom of the hip and over lock the edge.

Sleeves!

The sleeves were difficult, the technique was to gather the sleeves in by sewing two tack stitched on the sleeve and pulling them to make it gather the excess material together, after the gathering was done we have to see the sleeve on to the dress making sure the gathering was equal all the way around. After this was completed I had to neaten the sleeves by turning then up by 2cm ad sewing them in a straight line, making sure they were to a professional standard

The final days of pattern cutting

After all the material was cut out it was ready to sew!! Firstly I sewed the darts in the front of the dress making sure I sewed straight of the edge, the next stage was to see the lined pockets on to the dress! It was difficult but after a few times I managed it. I then had to see the invisible zip into the back of the dress, but firstly I had to shorten the zip as it was to long for my dress( nightmare). It was pretty simple all I had to do it sew on the machine back and forward a few time and chop Olathe rest of the zip of I didn't want.

Experimenting

I experimented on the body with parts of fabric twisted and turned to try and recreate part of the brain that's feels emotions, controlled thinking and behaviour. I choose the shoulder and arm whole on the body to recreate the brain as I thought it would give a good outcome and some interesting shapes, here's how it went...