Using Mannequins

Today we meet our new lecture for thursdays - Fiona. She encouraged us to have a go at pinning some of our samples onto mini and standard sized mannequins to enable us to get an idea of how our samples might be used in a garment.

Using the mini mannequins, you can visualise how the samples might look if they were made on a larger scale.

I then moved on to pinning my samples onto a standard sized mannequin....

I think the finger knitting that I did works really well as a collar - a sort of interpretation of the collars of the Maasai tribe.

During year 0 we are only really allowed to screen print using paper stencils or masking off areas i.e. with yarn or lace. Getting a screen exposed is reserved for years 2-3. Although you can still create some nice prints using this method, it does make the task quite labour intensive as you can only use a paper stencil a couple of times before it starts disintegrating. I really can't wait until we get to expose some screens!

I was speaking to Fiona about this, and she suggested I try a process that one of her friends uses in her artwork. You paint thickly with acrylics onto thick cartridge paper and then lay your fabric over the wet painted image of design and press down so the fabric takes the paint.

I used the back of the rag rug sample that I did, the process of rag rugging created this unintentional pattern on the back which in turn reminds me of the rows of tiny glass seed beads used in the Maasai's Jewellery.

This was the first attempted, which actually turned out to be my favourite, I really liked the painterly effect that the print shows.

I found that the paint dries quite quickly, and so you have to be really speedy, so it is difficult to create a very intricate or precise design. As you can see, I have daubed the paint on pretty haphazardly in my haste. I think this would be a difficult process to use on a large scale.