Whirly Wool

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Crochet is cool

Hello! I have been teaching myself how to crochet, and my hooks FINALLY came a few days ago which meant I could get started! So far I've taught myself how to make this basic pattern. There are a billion tutorials on youtube that I found really helpful, but I think the best would definately be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqca00LdmAc 

A lot of the tutorials that were supposedly for "beginners" where a little hard to follow, either due to bad camera quality so you couldn't really see what loops they were going into etc, or they didnt really explain about counting your loops or yarning over etc, just little things that if missed, you will end up getting terribly mixed up like me.

So anyway, I haven't done that much with it, but I just need to get my techniques down before I can try bigger and better things!

Knit, knit glorious knit!

Hello! It's SUMMER! Well... for me anyways, I keep forgetting that all my friends have silly exams and rubbish like that, but I am DONE. Woot! This post is all about knitting. Knit, knit, glorious knit! At the beginning of my most recent semester at Heriot Watt, I was slightly terrified of knit because I completely fail at hand knitting before trying anything which the machines. But now I love it! Our brief was to create a half scale garment using either domestic or v-bed knitting machines. I much preferred the domestic machines so I stuck with my strengths.

Here are some images of my final garment, along with a final illustration and some of the sketchbook development.

Sketchbook work-

Final illustration- 

 Final garment front and back

 Close up details of combined knitting and hand sewing-

I definitely hope to combine the knitting skills I have learned and refined this year with my 3rd year capsule collection at uni, which I am excited about, even though I don't return to uni for another 6 months or something crazy like that! 

Really feel like I need to paint something, going a little insane with so lazy and uncreative in my first few weeks of summer. Crazy lady!

K

Tailored Jacket Shmacket

I have been SO busy the past few weeks. Especially the past few days I have been living off jelly for fear that eating a full meal will take up too much time! I think it's time to calm down now though, i'm finished tomorrow and i'm heading home to Glasgow, my beautiful city that I don't ever want to leave again! 

This is my tailored jacket project, which was a group project between me and two other girls, and we pulled it off! HUZZAH! We each did a half scale jacket individually which was handed in 6 weeks ago, but that was seriously the first time we have each ever tackled a tailored jacket. I'm not altogether sure tailoring is for me. I like pattern drafting, and all of this carry on, but I much more enjoy being creative and I just feel that with tailoring there isn't much room to do that. 

Our design is very feminine whilst maintaining an element of elegance and luxury. I hate how a lot of tailored womenswear just really looks like smaller versions of menswear and I don't like it one bit. I like women to embrace their femininity and I can't be arsed with the whole power dressing, lets have massive shoulders and lets put socks down our pants whilst we're at it. No, as a designer, and a human being, I think it's nice for girls to look like girls. 

Sorry for the dodgy illustration, our group totally forgot we even had to produce one for this garment project, so me being the nice person that I am offered to produce this super quick sketch. 

I'm just really glad to have this project out of my life, it has been the worst one yet. SO MUCH TOILING! 

Now I am away to handsew onto my knitting samples. More posts to come on that! I love knit! 

K

Meadham Kirchoff/ My Little Pony

I'm currently taking an illustration and graphics class which is to result in the making of promotional packaging. I chose to focus on Meadham Kirchoff and I thought it would be really cool and different to show them collaborating with My Little Pony to create a perfume/bubble blower hybrid. So in these photos, I have a research/development board with my illustrations for influence, and then I continue to physically make a unicorn shaped bubble blower. It was kinda trick making this product but I soon became very nifty with the help from my glue gun. 

The final image is a potential illustration for the packaging of the perfume box. It's not all finished yet, but I just wanted to upload my progress. Everyone got to present their ideas and final outcome and we all thought it would be relaxed an informal, but we all got ripped to shreds. Presenting is definately the worst part of my course, but I guess it was good to recieve critisism... 

I think this product would be good to have, I love bubbles! 

K

make a dress out of six triangles, go!

I made a dress out of six triangle shaped pattern pieces; no sketching, no toile, and it actually fits me! It’s made from calico as it was just a quick little project, but I think i’m definately going to replicate this skirt and do more work on the stand rather than sticking to flat patterns all the time. I have SO many designs for clothes I want to make, and I have decided that i’m no longer buying clothes, not just because I pretty much can’t afford it, but because it will encourage me to MAKE MAKE MAKE. Mark Timmins the head of fashionland at Heriot Watt gave a really amazing talk about how we are fashion designers, not fashion consumers and it has really stuck in my head.

Ps. I have only learned this past week that it is called a 'toile' and not a 'mock up'. Feel like a tomato for being such a fool! Now I know that when i'm in groups doing work and I bang on about the 'mock up' people aren't staring at me like i'm a loony for nothing.

K

i heart polka dot dresses

I guess this is a little preview into how I am like as a designer. I love making clothes that I can wear, and I deteste making clothes for briefs that I just think are a bit crap because I wouldn't wear them in real life. I made this dress a wee while ago as a personal project whilst balancing my semester 1 timetable. It didn't really take that long, probably 2 days? Anyways, I think it's cute, I haven't worn it that many times because for some reason i'm always scared that the clothes I make will somehow just break and rip and all of these bad things. So I hardly ever wear them. I have another dress incredibly similar to this one that I also made but it is blue and white and has cuter buttons and has a lace trim around the collar and the waist. I will put photos of them up soon!

K

six ways to wear leather

 

Hello, I made a nice wee shirt a while back and took a bunch of photos of it. it is sheer at the back and much longer than it is at the front which I am loving now! It was part of the magazine I did in uni which was super. I’ve made a bunch of things outside of uni and I just never find the time to put them up I feel like such a baddy.

 

So these are the images from the fashion shoot me and my group for a magazine project done at uni. Modelled by me and Pamela, and photographed by Claire. I don't have links to their blogs as i'm a newbie i'm sorry! I got carried away on photoshop editing them and ended up editing the lot, which gave me lotsa practise. I missed out on CAD in first year being a direct entry person, which is annoying! I don't think they turned out too bad! Our magazine is called Vex, and it's inspired heavily on The Skinny, with a tongue and cheek attitude and plenty of "edgeness" about it. I think we did a fab job considering we are fashion designers and not computer magazine wizzes! 

K

bath time, no nips!

I recently got a shiny new slr camera for my christmas and I’ve not had much opportunity to take pictures with it, so the other night when I went for a bath I had the magical idea of forcing my boyfriend to take snaps of me in the water. He wasn’t at all displeased but it was all in the name of art and photography etc. think they turn out nae too bad. It wasn’t helped by the fact I kept drowning every 5 secs but it was just for fun.

I had to crop all my photos to prevent my nipnips from being seen, sorry! Nips and the like on the internet have been disapproved by said boyfriend. 

K

en garde! sports inspired fashion

 In semester 1 of my course at Heriot Watt University, I was given a brief to create sports inspired clothing. I was inspired by Fencing, and the designer Helmut Lang and I created this outfit (below). It was part of a collection created by me and my group of fabness! I think our designs really flow, and although we didn't agree on somethings (yikes!) everything fell into place and the overall result is shown above. Me and my dore-looking-haven't-spelt-for-3-nights-straight face "modelled" these garments (and I use that term VERY loosely!).

K

black books

I always, ALWAYS carry about with me a little black book. I'm so creepy and protective over them, and I tend not to let anyone peek incase they see a bad page about me venting and writing really crap poems. I always jot down wee doodles of potential garments, or I write things in them. They are super personal to me, and if I couldnt write things down, sometimes I think I could quite possibly explode! I think they are handy wee things to have, and every creative should have one. Did I just refer to myself as 'a creative'? I seen it written down somewhere and I tried to make it mine but it just makes me sound lame! 

K

my skin is your skin

 

Throughout my studies I am constantly inspired by artists far more so than fashion designers. I know this makes me a baddie for not constantly spouting fashion jargon nonsense, or being filled to the brim with designer knowledge. But I think I just 'get' art, and I think it's nice to look at other elements of life for inspiration, as opposed to who's done what before and how we can remake and renew it. 

I was overjoyed and raring to go when in my CCS class, the brief was to choose a designer or artist and create a poster to support an essay about their attitude to the body. I seen Jenny Saville's name at an instant and I didn't bother reading any of the other options on either list. 

I took it upon myself to try and do a photoshoot in my living room, with my good friend Paul, and try and get a feel for Saville's works on a more personal level. I definately took my own approach to the brief, and smothered my amazing model in tomato ketchup to signify blood, and we get a sheet of glass that was to be a metaphor for how society and art history has constantly pushed a microscope on women's bodies to enlarge every single wrinkle of cellulite, and every hair out of place, or in the 'wrong' place...

I had to present my poster (the top image) in front of my class, and as I am doing now (babbling on quite a bit) I did then too. I think it's okay to babble, at least hopefully I got my point across.

So yes, I just wanted to have something cool and exciting for my first blog entry, and i'm happy with this poster so all is good in the hood. 

K