Elective week

Jewellery elective

Last week I completed my elective. This year instead of being able to choose out electives, we were put into them, from what we did last year and the way the college has decided to change the course layout.

So I ended up doing jewellery again for the second year, but of course this time we advanced to level 2.

I thought that I was going to not enjoy this elective, because of doing it before, it wasn’t something new and exciting to learn about. After last year at the end of the elective I had really started to not like it as well, so I wasn’t really looking forward to it.

However it did not turn out to be that bad, we had a wider brief, meaning that we had a better choice of materials and types of jewellery to make.

The brief stated that we had to make a piece of jewellery that was for the body rather than just a standard piece of normal jewellery that you would wear on a day to day basis.

After researching into some designers, I decided that I wanted to create a neck piece. But I wanted it to be quite restricting, so it would force the wearer to be in a particular position.

I also chose to use fabric, instead of traditional jewellery materials, such as wire. I felt that this pushed the boundaries and really rejected the idea of traditional jewellery.

I made my final piece from dark blue/black leather. I wanted to laser cut a pattern out of it, but for that week the laser cutter was out of use, so I had to cut the pattern by hand, which did not only hurt my hand a lot, but also took a very long time to complete.

To keep my neck piece structured, I boned all of the seams and around the top layer to keep it stiff and make it so the material would not fit to the body.

I am pleased with how far I have got with mu piece, all I need to do now, is place mesh underneath some of the cut outs to add variation and texture.

Hopefully I will be finished by the end of this week, so I can then spend a nice weekend at home relaxing and not having to worry about anything.