Unit X: Dress and Draw the City with Sarah Easom

Today has been just lovely!

I must admit when received the equipment list for Sarah Easom’s ‘Dress and Draw the City’ workshop, I wasn’t too keen on lugging around a bag full of fabrics and drawing tools all morning. But since the Mancunian weather had decided for once to be....somewhat pleasant, it turned out to be very a nice workshop.

As it was a Friday morning, predictably there weren’t too many of us that turned up. So after waiting around for a bit for any stragglers we set off towards All Saints Park as our first location. Here, Sarah asked us to drape our fabrics and garments over any interesting objects we could find and begin to draw the silhouette that we ended up with. It must have looked rather bizarre from afar but this was actually quite a fun exercise! I chose to drape some silky, printed fabric over a tall stone and tried to create some sort of shape by twisting and knotting the fabric around it. Drawing wasn’t the easiest thing as I’m a little out of practice but I got into the swing of things eventually.

Meanwhile, Sarah came around to talk to us one by one, and when she reached me we talked about how to go about improving the design process through drawing from observation. She made a very good point about how it’s very difficult to design a garment without having a real object in front of you for reference; be it stand development or simply a piece of drape over a stone! Looking at my drawing, she suggested that I concentrate on shape and silhouette rather than just knotted detail of the draped fabric. Particularly, she pointed out how from my angle, the bag I had carelessly placed in front of the rock could form a silhouette detail as a portion of the garment that juts out. From this, I started to draw the bag with the aim to capture the differences in texture and shape between the tough hessian of the bag and the silky drape over the hard stone. I think there might be a general pattern emerging in my work as I am continually drawn to the interplay between fabrics and textures. This is something Sarah encouraged me to explore in the feedback to the previous project so who knows, I might be onto something!

But I digress.  We must have spent an hour or so at the park and only had time for one other location. It was suggested that we go to the town hall. At this point the sun had started to shine so I didn’t object to the walk. Especially since, despite having lived in Manchester for almost a year now, I still hadn’t seen Manchester Town Hall. When we got there, I was immediately taken by the beautiful gothic architecture of the building. There wasn’t a great deal we could drape our fabrics onto here but I decided to loop my fabric around some iron railings instead. Again, I was interested in the contrasting textures as the railings provided a tough structure whilst the fabric gave it softness and shape.

All in all, it has been a really nice day. It was quite a relaxed exercise but talking to Sarah in the informal setting has been the most helpful part of the workshop. My drawing definitely needs some development over the summer but after talking to Sarah I feel comforted knowing that I might be on the right track when it comes to learning how to design.

And now I am off to my home-town of Cardiff for a blissful bank holiday weekend!

Unit X: Colour Workshop with Leigh Cooke

So far on the course I have resisted from using colour in my work. I would love to be able to get away with the (perfectly valid) excuse that a muted colour palette is part of my artistic sensibilities but if truth be told I am simply terrified of colour! In the past, I have enjoyed working with colour and print but this year my focus has shifted towards design in terms of construction and shape-making. When it comes to bringing the two elements of my practice together I find that I am completely lost.

So today was a bit of a challenge for me as we had a colour workshop with Leigh Cooke, a print designer for Hermes scarves. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but Robin insisted that it would benefit Fashion students. As a general rule, anything with the Robin seal of approval is probably worth giving a chance!

I was running a little late this morning as I had chosen 10 minutes before the workshop to start gathering my equipment (God help me next year when I no longer have the luxury of living just 2 minutes away from campus!). I’m too much of a ‘goody-two-shoes’ to have a blasé attitude to turning up to lectures late so was a little afraid that I would upset the designer of such a high profile fashion brand. I suppose it’s a sign of my naivety that every time we have a guest lecturer I immediately assume that they will have the demeanor of Miranda Priestly from ‘The Devil Wears Prada’. But I was pleasantly surprised to meet Leigh as he was very engaging and friendly from the start.

The task on hand was to use a postcard size image of our choosing and to pick out individual colours from its overall composition. Once we were confident with the colours we had extracted, we could start to play around with ratios of each colour to see how they would look together. As we worked, Leigh Cook spoke to us about how he would use this process as part of his degree and even now in his current profession in order to come up with original colour schemes.

Initially, I found the workshop rather therapeutic and could certainly see myself trying out the technique again in my spare time. But after a while, despite Leigh’s encouragement, I started to get a bit frustrated with myself as the colour scheme I had picked out just didn’t look ‘right’! To be fair, he did explain that as a textile student he would have to repeat this process many times. So really, it’s no wonder that my work showed no resemblance to the examples he showed us at the beginning of the session.

Overall, Leigh Cooke was a joy to work with and was clearly very passionate about what he does.  I think the workshop was a great introduction to a new way of working and I intend to keep developing this in my future work. Who knows, I might actually take the leap and add a splash of colour to my next project!

Unit X: Zero-Waste Pattern Cutting with Fiona Mills

Our lecture with Fiona Mills was an introduction into the concept of Zero Waste pattern cutting. The objective of this process is quite simply to reduce the amount of waste produced in the creative and commercial pattern cutting process. Shockingly, 15-20% of fabric waste is produced at this stage in current commercial practice with even greater waste produced by high-end designers as a result of their elaborate and complicated designs. This is worrying as, despite the protestations of many big brands, much of that waste does not get reused or recycled. This is even more of a problem now as fashion is fast moving and the seasonal trends mean that more garments are produced at a quicker pace; therefore greater wastage.

It is then interesting that though this is a contemporary issue, the practice of Zero Waste Pattern Cutting has been around for centuries and takes inspiration from the first garments ever produced. This harks back to a time when fabric was a valuable commodity as Roman and Grecian garments would be constructed using entire lengths of fabric and shaped simply by tucking and draping.

Fiona then spoke to us about the Yield exhibition held in New Zealand in 2011 that celebrated the use of Zero Waste in modern practice. The exhibition brought together a diverse cross-section of designers and researchers that are the forerunners of this field. This ranged from young designers such as Julia Hamsden, a recent design student, who works primarily with menswear and uses the waste pattern to create quirky grown-on details on generic garments for the commercial sector. On the other end of the spectrum, there are designers such as Yeohlee Tang who create garments for high fashion who have experimented with the technique for a high-fashion market.

The lecture followed an afternoon workshop with Fiona herself who has just completed a masters with her research based around transforming commercial and designer patterns into Zero-Waste garments. As part of the workshop, we were given a set of pattern designs from the Yield exhibition and were asked to recreate the design without any instructions. This struck me as a bit of an odd request as I regard pattern-cutting as being about precision and accuracy. But Fiona assured us that it was just about having fun with the construction process and being creative.

I decided to take her word for it and chose to work with a skirt pattern by Yeolee Tang. It seemed simple enough but when I got down to cutting and reassembling the pieces I just couldn't figure out how to put it all together so that it looked like a designer skirt. I really didn't help that I didn't have any clear images to see what the end product should look like so essentially I was trying to re-create something that I had never seen before! Since I have major control issues, this was quite a frustrating process. But Fiona was pretty encouraging and eventually I managed to fit all the pieces fit together so that they actually resembled a garment.

Aggravatingly, when I got home I Googled an image of the garment I had tried to recreate and it turned out that my skirt looked nothing like the original! *deep breaths* 

But I won’t lose my mind completely as at the end of it all Fiona reminded me that the process was just about experimentation and creating original designs through the process of problem solving. This is something I'm very interested and might even take another crack at it when I start designing for my next project. All in all, a really great lecture with an equally engaging and friendly lecturer.