Design Project: Coats and Sweaters

Well I am doing excellently at this blogging challenge thing! (Oops.) Honestly, I'd rather blog when I have something to actually write about, which I just don't have every day. But I do today, go me! 

This was part of my final portfolio project. It is the lead-in to my senior collection, which you have already seen bits and pieces of. For the most part, I wanted to get the aesthetic down before I worried about specific details on garments. I started out with a ton of hand-sketched croquis, with lots and lots of ideas. However, my sketches just did not seem as sophisticated as my digital drawings, so I re-did them on the computer, and I'm so glad I did. I love the result!

As I mentioned, the my personal goal was to get put a finger on the aesthetic I wanted. I was going for an old world feel, with timeless fabrics (wool, cashmere, tweeds, silk, cabling), intense detail, and some luxury. The kind of garment someone would wear apres-ski, in Aspen or the Alps. Kind of Sundance catalog/Gorsuch feel. Wait til you see my fabric -- I'm certainly inching into that price point, if nothing else!

I've ended up going a different direction with some pieces (for example, the jacquard sweater is now the fairisle sweater), but I definitely expected things to change. I am planning to do two or three coats, and as crazy as it sounds, I actually can't wait to begin slaving over them. There's just something about tailoring and fine wool that gives me butterflies!

Oh, I wanted to mention, I've become more active recently on Ravelry-land. Let's be friends, I love stalking projects! My username is AddieMarie :)

Finally, can we please have some LOLZ about how far I've come in my fashion illustration skills? More laughs here!

Design Project: Jacquard and Intarsia Patterns

This fall semester I took a portfolio class. It was a lot of fun and a lot of work, and I'm really happy with the outcome. We had a variety of projects that I will share, but one of my favorites to work on was this print design project. It was just not like anything I'd ever done before, and that made it exciting!

I settled on a rather weird color palate. Somehow I got really into orange, and just went with it! I decided to build the project around a cut-and-sew hoodie I had made last year, which was out of this awesome geometric double-knit jacquard (pictured below). With that to work from, I did jacquard and intarsia patterns only, with bold geometrics. It was a cool challenge to do knit-only patterns, because it meant limited colors (due to potential cost of multi-color jacquards, which would be astronomical if they were produced) and limitation in shapes (due to the structure of knit fabric). Below is my color palate, the original hoodie, and then a few of my prints photoshopped onto clothing I had made.

Another thing I enjoyed was that I got to play with multiple color combinations and offerings. I made about forty different combinations of colors and prints, hung them all up, and then narrowed them down in a very difficult decision-making process.

All of my croquis are drawn in Adobe Illustrator and colored and shaded in Photoshop. Prints were made in Illustrator. I can't find my absolute up-to-date JPEG files, actually; they are supposed to have slightly pixelated prints (to imitate a knitted chart), and a sweater texture overlay like the first photo. Oops!

The triangle sweater above is my absolute favorite, and I'm actually going to knit something very similar for my senior collection! I'm so stoked to see it come to life.

Lately...

Welcome to my life lately. All Illustrator & Photoshop, all the time. I sewed for about three hours yesterday, finishing a project, and now it's back to the computer screen. In-progress portfolio pages for Cut & Sew Knits, and CAD boards.

But life is really good. I think I say this every year, but this is my hardest semester yet. Balancing homework, classes, work, friends, and a boyfriend has been almost overwhelming.... but totally worth it. I've also been making a solid effort to still have fun, something I didn't always do.

For example, playing (and winning) darts on my birthday, and making time to sew a polka-dot birthday dress.

Besides all of this, I feel like real life -- that is, life after college -- is looming right in front of me. I'm getting ready to register for spring classes, and seeing that number of credits needed is both terrifying and exciting. Important interviews, landing an internship, career path discussions, and difficult decisions have been the themes of this fall.

I've been prioritizing my life, nothing new, and sadly, blogging just isn't up there for me right now. I miss it, I have such a backlog of things to post, and I wish I could catch up on everyone's archives for the past, I don't know, forever... but when it comes down to it, I need to focus on school. And what else would I have to do over Christmas break but catch up on the blogosphere? :)

Little Gems

I am a terrible blogger. Let's just face it, shall we? I think, after four years of this, we all know I will post only sporadically, and in brief spurts at best. I probably won't reply to comments regularly, even though I ought. I won't take consistently good photos and I will change up my content all the time. I wish I were better at this, but to be honest, it just isn't the right time in my life. I've been getting better at prioritizing my time, and by doing so, school goes to the top and internet goes to the bottom.

And that school... Let me tell you, I've been learning so much in my two years in the program. It's harder than I ever imagined, but it's also the kind of thing you learn to deal with as time goes on, and you get better at managing how you work the more you practice. And the people help. Having made best friends out of the girls in my major has, quite truly, made this whole Apparel thing survivable.

Anyway, it's finals week. I'm in the middle of making portfolio pages for the garments I made in my Advanced Pattern class. This past week was our fashion show. But more on all of that later! Here's my Children's line from last semester!











More projects to come!

Line Development - Men's Line

This was my men's wear line. For this one, we got to be a little less creatively driven, and we had a lot more requirements. The main ones were that we had to do striped knit shirts with varying patterns, that it had to be a resort collection, and it had to have a certain amount of branding, motifs, and emblems included. Knots were my main theme, and my mom even tied the knot on my cover page above! So sweet. :)



This collection was hand-drawn, and then colored using Photoshop. It was so neat to learn to use the program to create patterns! Coloring remained my favorite part of the process through this project, and learning to dodge and burn was a total game-changer for the quality of my flats.



Also, I draw very angry men, apparently. They're all sneering!



This line was a bit of a struggle to complete in our given two-week time period. What I remember most from the day I turned it in was the sheer exhaustion: I hadn't slept in three days save a few naps, and I couldn't even stay awake through my classes afterward. But, it was worth it. It's always worth it to pull all-nighters like that, because the alternative is turning in sub-par work. By the time I finished this project, I decided that I enjoyed outerwear more than anything else--and it helped that I was better at it than other aspects of design. I think that was my favorite part of the class in the end: learning your strengths and weaknesses is so hugely important to success. Knowing that I enjoyed outerwear gave me direction for the next project: children's clothing!

Line Development - Women's Line

Welcome to my life in Fall, 2011.



I lived and breathed my Line Development class for three months, and oh, what a crazy time it was. I wrote about it back in January, but to give more of a recap of what the class actually was, I figured I would show some pictures from my portfolio. Before this class, I couldn't sketch. I mean, I really could not articulate my ideas on pen and paper. Here is proof, and I only am linking you to this to prove a point: these awkward drawings make me cringe!

To say I was nervous for this class would be an understatement. Sewing is my strong point, not sketching! And yes, I struggled, but all the extra work make success that much sweeter.

But anyway! This is my women's wear line. I was inspired by arched doorways and hinges, and that was the driving point behind most of the pieces.





Everything in this collection was hand drawn and hand colored. I used Prismacolor pencils and a clear Prismacolor blender on top to get the partial rendering effect. Coloring was definitely my favorite part! Getting the texture, hand-drawing embossed leather and tweeds... it was such fun. Remember that jacket from up top... You'll be seeing something similar soon!