17/4/14

Today at uni I was a little unsure of what to do as I had planned to use the heat press because I wanted to create some samples. As all of my fabrics are synthetic I know they will melt easily so I wanted to create some samples that had many melted layers of fabric and also incorporate the melted fabric with some knit. But unfortunately I could not do these samples and as it's a bank holiday weekend I will have to wait until next Tuesday. Although I think I can create some of the samples at home with the iron but obviously this won't reach temperatures as high as the heat press, yet I'll give it a go I think it will be a lot of trial and error but this may help me to prepare for when I use the heat press next week. 

But today at uni I carried on with knit samples as I bought a new wool yesterday which is yellow. Although my colour choices for this project so far have included mainly greys/ silvers and purples I wanted to introduce a completely different colour. I chose yellow because a part of my early research focused on binary opposites and purple and yellow are complementary colours and therefore opposite one another on the colour wheel. Also I feel that yellow relates to the DMT aspect as it's bright and in my research experiencing DMT was like seeing a bright light, so I thought yellow would portray this well. 

I started knitting with the yellow wool and as it was thicker it created a different aesthetic to my other wools. I found the yellow wool also easier to knit with, I suppose this is from it being a plain wool compared to the other fancy yarns. Whilst knitting with the yellow I wanted to incorporate an additional aspect so I cut a long strip of the organza tied this to the yellow and began to knit with it. I really liked this aspect it made it so much more interesting than just producing a plain sample. This didn't take that long to produce either, compared to my other samples I think this is because I've been knitting everyday so I've got the hang of it and therefore can work faster. Being able to work faster I made another sample however this time combining all three wools so this sample consisted of my yellow purple and metallic yarn. I love how this sample came out I just feel it's really different to my other samples and it's not really something I've seen before such as on other garments or from similar samples. I also really like it because I feel it ties all the projects main areas together such as the DMT and reams aspect. It also has a really nice texture because it's soft especially from the three different wools.

So after creating these two samples I decided I would stop with the knitwear because I have 9 samples now which is a sufficient amount and I don't want to have a lot of knitwear in my sketchbook that will outweigh everything else, as I am a woman swear designer and not a textiles designer. Therefore even though I really enjoy textiles and surface decoration I would really like to move away from them and focus a bit more on designing.

Bearing this in mind I'm going to develop these knit samples into designs, particularly focussing on how they can be worn and how they can work with other fabrics. I have scanned them in, so I'm going to play around with them digitally and on paper I may do some collaging I haven't decided yet as I'm unsure on what would be best to do with them. Taking yesterday's advice from my tutor I want to make my work more engaging. So bearing this in mind tomorrow I hope to carry on with the Spiritual developments but making them interactive and hopefully combining 2D and 3D together.