CUUUUUUUUBES!

Cubes, cubes and more cubes.
This week we started to sample and make our final pieces, me being me decided to do something long and tedious but I know that It will look good in the end.
I am making a garment out of open faced cubes. The cubes are only 10 by 10 cm so I have had to draw out and cut 76 of them. I have then had to sew a square around the centre to keep the material stable and then over-lock each edge of each square so that they don’t fray and it looks tidy.
This took me ages to do and I was actually sitting at the sewing machine for about 7 hours straight which was pretty frustrating, and the cubes aren’t even sewn together yet.
I’m in the process of doing that now; I am sewing each side together with two rows of stitching, one on the edge of the flap and one down the corner of the cubes, this keep the cubes structure and also stops the loose pieces of fabric from flapping about.
Whilst I was pinning some of the cubes together last week and placing them on the manikin to get the shape of the smock dress that I want to create, I realised that it was looking a little bland and that even though the cubes gave surface texture that It was lacking colour and depth.
I was talking to the tutors and have come up with the idea of spray painting the garment once it is constructed together. I looked back through my research to pick out some colours and themes that I could possibly use as a top layer to my garment.
I have now picked out the idea of merging colours and the colour spectrum, I did a piece using inks that ran together to create different colours so I’m hoping to use this idea, but with stronger lines and angles, so it fits with the strong structure of my piece. I am going to protect some of the piece so it is not touched by the spray paint, and the build up the layers of paint to create contrast and light and dark areas.
I’m hoping that once I have done this my piece will be more I wanted it to be in the first place. I have to finish sewing the cubes together by Tuesday so that I can start attaching the cubes to the cubes to create the smock dress. I’ve really enjoyed doing this project and I hope that my final piece reflects the amount of hard work that I have put into it.


This week I have also started work on my PPD1 presentation and choosing my 15 best pieces of work. It has been quite tough to go through everything and chose which is the best, because there are pieces that I like more than others but aren’t necessarily the best, so I have started to whittle down the pieces and will hopefully have decided by the end of this week. I have started to cover my DVD case and it looks really good, I have stuck to a theme which seems to work the best, so hopefully that will give me a good mark.
The presentation has been quite hard, I know what I want to say in the presentation, it’s just the images that I need to use that I’m finding difficult, which is strange because it’s usually the other way around. I’m going to do some more work on the presentation this week and start picking out things that could work. So hopefully that will be finished soon and I can start rehearsing it so I sound confident when it actually comes to doing it.


It was the third week with the third years this week, and was pretty much just doing the standard things again, unpicking, patterns, hand sewing. However this week they were having crits of some of their outfits so it was good to see some of the collections put together, and that was really inspiring as I got to see such good shapes and so many different styles and themes.
Their hand in date is next Friday so I can imagine that this week’s session is going to be pretty mad with everyone trying to get everything finished, so that should be interesting, but hopefully everything will be done and it will just be little things that I have to do.