Textiles at Couture week

Couture week is here, and its amazing as usual! One of my fashion highlights of the year, couture week brings us the best if the best, a display of the best talent and artistry around. With that been said, there has been an array of wonderful prints and embellishments seen at couture week this time round, with Margiela opting for sequins and tinsel-like decorations, Valentino being, well, good old Valentino and Giambattista Valli using monochrome prints and texture. It seems us textile designers get everywhere!

W for Weave

So, technical blocks are over- finito! It's been such a learning curve bouncing from knit to stitch to print to weave, and experimenting with both constucted and printed textile processes. Weave was a therapeutic last block, a nice way to ease back into the routine of university life after the Christmas holidays! Here are some close ups of my favourite samples...

Inspiration

How time flies! I am now in my fourth technical block, wonderful Weave! After working my way through knit, stitch and print, weaving is a much more structured practise, with numbers and levers and systems being the basis of working and creating patterns. A newbie to weave, I have been both apprehensive and excited - is that possible? - to get going with totally new process and make some exciting samples. So far, so good! I'm really liking weave and how therapeutic it is, and i've been looking at the work of several weave artists for inspiration- these pieces by Brook & Lyn are amazing!

(Photographs sourced from Trendland.com)

Design work for print

I've done this in reverse order, but this post is a series of designs I created when drawing in preperation for screen printing. The task was to create six A3 designs that could be put onto a screen, resulting in a group discussion on which design would be best to carry on and develop within the printing technical block.

This final design was the one we decided would be best for print!

And below are a series of quick drawings, designs for my swtatch book created using just black ink and fineliners. I found that these drawings didn't really work when attempting to create digital prints, but I quite like the drawings on their own. 

Stitch Stitch Stitch

Stitch was my second technical block- but i've been working on it quite abit longer than I did knit and print, but it's finally finished! Rather than focus on embroidery and work onto flat samples, I decided to take my stitch work down a more 3-D route, making samples designed to stand free from a piece of paper or a piece of fabric.

For my final four stitch samples I did some quick sketches on what I imagined them to look like ...
 

 
 

And here they are!

The sample below was made using mostly papers and cards and magazine cut outs for a more rigid and shinier appearance, before moving onto the use of fabric in other samples.

These samples are my final series of samples, and were made by sewing together loops of fabric and magazine cut outs, then stuffing them with rolled up strips of cotton, hand dyed using acrylic and gouache paints.

The structures below are stacked samples, created as before but without the fabric within them. I like how the turned out!