The Show

Before the first show everything was quite calm and under control. The first show was a major success and flowed very smoothly thanks mostly to the work of Beth Nelis who was very organised in managing all of the dresses and models. We had all the dressers in a production line with the next five or six dress sets ready to go onto the models as soon as they were off of the catwalk. There were a few makeup people on hand to change the lipstick to match the dresses before they went to line up for the catwalk.

The problem came with the second show. To the audience the show went perfectly smoothly with everything flowing well however backstage it was not the case. Most of the people who had been running the first show left to watch the second show. Beth put me in charge of the dressing room and the stage manager had changed over to someone else. The makeup people had all gone to watch the show without telling anyone and this left us all running around trying to find them while trying to dress the models. Designers kept coming into dress their own models which left me wondering who was dressed and who wasn't. On top of that the stage manager didn't realise the amount of quick changes and kept asking me to send them models who were still on the catwalk with the last set of dresses!

Despite all the running around and panicking we all somehow managed to pull a successful show together and even if it was stressful at the time I greatly enjoyed the experience and am glad I done it. Hopefully it will have prepared me for work in the future.

The film was arranged by the lecturers at Glasgow Clyde College and shows much of the Artistic courses there.

Urban - Final Dresses

By this point in the course everyone was very stressed trying to make up their garments in time for the show. The lecturers actually had organised a photo shoot and a film to be made with our garments. Although  this was a great opportunity and we were all very pleased with the results it added to our stress levels by a lot as the garments had to be finished almost a week before the show and wouldn't be returned to us until the day before the show. This meant a lot of us had a lot of after hours working with pizza delivery.

Urban - Press and Publicity

For the Urban Project I was one of the people in charge of press and publicity. I contacted many bloggers from across Scotland as well as universities to invite them along though not many got back to me. I designed posters and made programmes I threw myself into this role fully. It did have it's challenges but it was something I enjoyed and I would love to do again. Although the class voted to use someone else's design here are the different poster designs I came up with:

Urban - Fashion Sketches

We were told to come up with 30 fashion sketches from our samples using dress styles adapted from simple shapes such as circles, rectangles etc.

Urban - Sampling

Upon completing our samples moved onto working with fabrics and creating manipulations with fabric. We were also encouraged to use our printed fabrics to enhance our samples as for our final outcome we were to create two dresses made with both print and manipulation. I decided to revisit pintucks and slash and fray techniques which I was familiar with as well as Shibori and origami we were both relatively new to me. I had done origami before however I had never tried origami in fabrics rather than paper. Shibori was new to me and I found out a lot. For example Shibori shouldn't be tried on a screen printed fabric particularly if you don't want it to catch fire.....

Urban - Weaving Wonders

In the midst of our collaging we took a detour into the world of weaving. This was something I was very excited about as our course was a print and embroidery course and there was little to no weaving or knitting involved. My first attempt was pretty much a failure however I then looked into weaving with acetate and strips of fabric which created a weave which I looked forward to incorporating into my final pieces.

Urban - Collages

After printing with our stencils we tried a new way of working. Whereas in previous projects we drew from photographs or straight from sources of inspiration, here we started by making backgrounds in the colours we had chosen for our print colour palette. We made these backgrounds using different papers and textures that were suggested to us from our photographs. We then cut up and manipulated the paper to create the shapes we could see in our photographs. I started to layer my backgrounds with manipulated acetate to create more shapes.