Fashion Embroidery & Stitch show in March 2012!

I received such a good phone call yesterday!!! It was about Madeira, having received my sponsorship report from my final major project they have asked me to exhibit with them in March, I couldn't believe it!! I obviously said yes so I will now have my own space in the Fashion Embroidery & Stitch Show which is in Birmingham from Tuesday 22nd - Sunday 25th March.
It is just what I needed, it will definitely motivate me to update my portfolio, although over Christmas I have been working on producing more commercial designs for my portfolio and I have around 30 digital designs using techniques and processes that I picked up from my placements, focusing on repeats for fashion fabrics. I now want to get some of these printed on to fabric so I can add embroidery and embellishment to them!

I spent ages on my report, describing my process from concept to finish and evaluating each of my final pieces, with materials and processes I used. After I had my report bound, I printed the front cover onto fabric and sewed into and added embellishments.

Degree Show

Final Few Days

I can not believe how much embroidery I managed to do in the last few days of my final major project, I even managed to do some dresses in just one day, but staying up till 4am! So I have not really had much time to update my blog and get the rest of my designs up, so I am going to start doing that now!

I mentioned before about struggling with embellishments on my digital fabrics, I felt a bit like that with this design too. The original design was created from mirror imaging one of my detailed drawings of flowers. I then changed the hue and saturation around on Photoshop till I was happy with the colours. I extended one part of the image to look like an abstract spine, so it would fit in more with my bone and fossil theme.

This was the drawing I manipulated on Photoshop.

After testing and sampling different colours I decided to go for a lime/neon green colour with hints of pinks and oranges as the colours worked really well together and fit the design. To pick out detail in the print I sampled sewing turquoise embroidery floss over lines in the petals. It worked quite nicely in the sample but when I came to do it on the final piece it did not work well and I found it too distracting.

What did work well with stitch was picking out the more luminous tones on the darker areas of the design.

 I felt quite lost on what to do with my fabric, but remembered seeing at Indigo trade show in Paris a fashion digital print length that had just been covered in clear sequins and it worked really well from a distance and looked like the sequins were printed or coloured. I started to layer over clear sequins keeping it symmetrical and decided to pick out the middle of the design. I also added tiny holographic purple sequins to bring out the purple dye splats and green crystals around the neckline of where the design would sit.

The design now has over 1000 clear sequins on it!

Continued..

I started to embroider and embellish into the bone, sewing around the edges so it was permanently fixed on using contrasting neon threads. I used contrasting colour to the nudes like greens and blues and then tried to use more neutral colours on the neon pink such as pale pink washers which i sprayed and light beads and sequins. I used chain and embellishments to parts of the bone. I am so happy with the finished design, the washers add a weight to the fabric and the tiny cogs give a quirky twist. Once the garment has been made up I plan to scatter more washers and clock parts around the fabric with french knots, stitches, negative shapes of sequin fabric and home made printed acetate sequins. I'm really excited to continue with this! Also used the super macro setting on my new camera to take these close up shots of the embroidery, I am well impressed with the detail and colour!

Continued...

More embroidery on the jacket now, I was not too sure at first but I like the jacket more now, I am really happy with the use of colours together and the different techniques combined.

Changes...

I decided to cut up the denim jacket and removed a pocket so I had space to embroider, this would allow me to add colour and make it more mine.

Embroidery Samples

Taking inspiration from fossil shapes I have been experimenting 'mix match' embroidery, clashing colours, layers of materials and 3d embroidery.