First days and dressmaking.

Today was my first day of the course, and luckily upon my arrival I learned that a friend I had made on my previous course was already enrolled, and so we decided to collaborate on a piece together. We grabbed a mannequin, and we had a cluster of weird and wonderful objects around us to use to make something, from bottle tops, to art supplies such as paints and inks, to fabric and other such recyclable materials. We were instantly drawn to the more blue and green colored objects and so we gathered a bunch of these to help assemble something. After looking at the things we had gathered we decided to work to hopefully make a peacock themed dress.

The pictures to the left are some of the materials we gathered, so you can see we had a range of things to work with.  We needed something to make the skeleton of the dress, so we could then cut and dye and add as needed- so we got an old potato sack and pinned it to the mannequin to start us off. To start off we thought that because the sack was quite large in diameter, we could bunch it up in the back and have it more fitted in the front, but our plans changed when we saw how it looked, but more about that later. The pictures below show how we tried to pin it in at the waist to look a bit more modern and like something that physically could be worn. (If we could ever get it off the mannequin that is!!)

The next step for us was to start customizing the dress, I made a brooch made out of two colours of ruffled material- which before their second lease of life I believe were rosette type things, with a bottlecap centre. Once that was done we had the idea to carry on the bottletops around the top of the dress, to give it a more quirky edge to it. After I made the brooch I realised how much I liked  the look of the rosette material contrasting against the plain sack and so we decided to make a halter neck out of it.


 The last thing we did today was we thought the back looked too plain- so we decided to expand on more of the peacock theme, and we found some mop heads, cut and tied them together, and dyed them blue and green to tie on the back of the dress, to represent the regal and colourful tail of a peacock. We also cut holes in the two sides of the back and found a raggedy green ribbon which we tied the back together with, this created a visually pleasing rippled effect, and made the dress get a lovely shape.