Designing

Here are a few designs/fashion illustrations of mine from the past year

 Collar designs; all of my outfits for my final project at college had focal point collars.

 Vintage style dress design.

 Dip dye tank top with foiled cross design.

 Collar illustrations.

 Coat and collar design.

Top and skirt design.

The Tableau Project (September 2011)

At the start of my art and design Foundation Degree we had to do a 'Tableau Project' where we had to recreate Gin Lane by William Hogarth; it had to be life size and we had to be part of it, here are some pictures:

Here is the original painting by William Hogarth

This is a picture of the stairs Gabby and I made before we painted them

Gabby on the left and me on the right; adding the finishing touches to our staircase and wall

A picture of the almost completed set design

Here is a picture of the finished set before we all took our places

All in our places

Unfortunately I can't find the final photo that was taken, but hopefully you can get an idea of the scale of the project just by these few photos. Designing the set and making props for it was so much fun and it turned out really well.

Dip Dye Heaven!

I do love a bit of dip dye! The idea behind my project is to bring a new life to old boring clothes, so I filled my bag with bargains from charity shops and got to work. I dip dyed the top half of the mint green blouse pink, added new button holes and buttons and also studded the collar with stars. The shorts were such a good find, as they are high waisted which has been an on going trend for the last couple of years. I screen printed the shorts with crosses and then used silver foil over the top to give them a metallic look.

Just a quick close up of the collar! Thanks for looking :)

Stars And Stripes

 Finally another blog post!! I've been really busy with college but now my other two outfits are complete I thought, I'd have a blogging session :). The skirt was mid length when I bought it from a charity shop (for £1), I gave it a dip hem as the asymmetric look is a big trend right now. The shirt was also from a charity shop; I wanted to get the 'American flag style' into the top some how but still wanted it to fit in with my other garments, so I used foil to add stars and one large stripe. I also removed the sleeves and a decorative pocket, added new buttons and used beading on the collar. Here's some more pictures...

 This is the shirt before.

This is just an up close picture of the print on the scarf.

Make do and mend

 For my final project at college I'm looking at recycling old clothes and materials and giving them a new life. Here are two of my creations; I have added a new collar, beading, foiling and black buttons to the shirt. The skirt is made from an old silk scarf and some black material - I then added gold beads in the shape of crosses to the front.

 This image shows the silk scarf, originally this was going to be the front.

 The collar is made from some napkins I picked up in a charity shop, I cut them up and dyed them black before sewing them to the shirt.

 I cheated and used fabric glue to attach these beads, I decided I would get way too frustrated sewing each one on by hand!!

 However, I did sew each of these beads on one by one, all 222 of them.

Thanks for looking people, I really appreciate it :)

weird print

This may be a bit of a scruffy print but I quite like it! I tie dyed the fabric with pink and lilac, then I used bubble wrap dipped in purple acrylic paint to print over the top. Finally, the strange triangle shapes are from a stamp that I made! Hope you all think its cool rather than a total mess, haha!! :-)

a little bit of painting

Here are a couple of paintings that I've done, the top one is based on Degas' -Dancers painting, and the second one is styled on Tamara De Lempicka's paintings, I used my friend Taylor as a model and kind of based it around her but using some of the techniques in De Lempicka's paintings. Sorry about the short post but I need to get to my lecture! haha, more blogging soon :)

Patchwork

I made a screen print inspired by Ziggy Stardust and Sailors, once I had printed it I thought it would make quite an interesting patchwork design, I used my sewing machine but this could alternatively be stitched by hand.

This patchwork is very different to the one above, it has a scruffy look about it which gives it character. I used scrap material as I like to try and re-use things rather than throw them away. This was influenced by Lesley Hardwick's incredible quilts.

Hello!

Before I get going properly I thought I would introduce myself and tell you a bit about what you can expect from my Blog - knit and sew. I am using this Blog to show you what I am working on at the moment as well as projects from the past! Expect a LOT of knitting, because I am a very keen knitter...