This was a continuation from last weeks Calvin idea. I was so happy because it actually worked! I think what I need to work on now is weak points in a fabric. That doesn’t mean that the fibres won’t come into it because they will. Already the cheaper cotton fabrics are still reacting worse to the same treatment I have given to the expensive silk/tencel blend for example. This is a quick look at only a few of the experiments. There were about five or so in total. I wasn’t supposed to put up the video below, but by the time it was half way uploaded I realise it was the wrong one.

The video shows you how I stretched the tops. Unfortunatley the fabric didn’t work as well as the light pink cotton above, in fact it rips in one point. (Don’t listen to closely for expletives). It took about 2.5 hours to upload so I won’t be putting the pink one up.

View my stretching video…

LAURA WADE
OUTCOMES PROPOSEL

I began this semester with the word hack. It was a key word in my research last semester and until the mid semester crit I thought that I had left the concept behind. The feedback I received gave me a chance to step back from my work and analyse it with a fresh eye. The word hack is a simple way to sum up processes that I have begun to explore. Last semester I was looking at hacking images of fashion whereas this semester I have begun hacking into the fibres and fabrics.
Once a garment changes from its original shape or silhouette there is an impulse as the wearer to throw the garment away. However if there is some kind of connection to the garment, faults are forgiven and becomes a piece that is cherished over time. I do not aim to recreate the connection/relationship between the owner and the garment, my goal is to test the limits and weaknesses of the fabrics to become the catalyst of new processes for me as a designer. I plan to create a series of garments that explore shrinking and stretching in different ways with different fabrics.

Design Vs Process
As Michael pointed out in the crit, my work this semester is based around finding new processes. The workshops in week 3 presented us with artists who worked by manipulating known processes or created their own. I was intrigued by Brian Eno’s drive to imagine new concepts simply by questioning the simplest techniques and processes.
Trying to break away from the accepted way of working was both daunting and exiting. Creating an original process meant that there were no references that I could rely on to guide my process. Essentially I allowed myself to thoroughly investigate the materials I’m working with before thinking about the relationship to the body or garment. I have led myself to redefine what I believed to be ‘designing’.

Steps I have taken so far…
1. Workshops
The first workshop that I connected with was the third class which was about process. As designers we are often taught one generic way of designing and it doesn’t necessarily allow any boundaries to be pushed. I researched Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies’ and found a quote from Eno that I connected with as a designer.
“The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations …If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn’t the case. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, ‘Don’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,’ or ‘Don’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude’.”
In class we used the cards as a prompt to create different systems of producing garments. It made me think seriously how much room there is to explore in the design and gave me hope that perhaps not everything has ‘been done before’.

2. Working Definitions
The working definition came from reading Yuniya Kawamura’s Fashion-ology.
“…dress attempts to balance two contradictory aims: it focuses our attractions and at the same time protects our modesty.” Y.Kawamura,pp.6, 2005. I looked at the two key words –highlighting and concealing- and researched how other people defined them. There were times when I got really caught up in how the definition could be interpreted. If you told someone the definition without giving the word garment, this could be interpreted in many ways which may not relate to my interpretation of the definition. I decided that the definition of any garment is and can be changed once it is worn by an individual. To anyone else it could be jacket, but to the wearer, they have created their own definition for their jacket. Essentially you could find any definition and attach it to the word garment and it could trigger a new process of working. I looked at many definitions randomly and then settled on a definition.
War- two opposing forces.
I began thinking how I could apply two opposing forces to a garment. I started with the fabric, and looked at stretching the fabric with two opposing forces. The way the fabric reacted to the stretch reminded me of garments I had worn that have gone out of shape due to wear and tear. Although the garment wasn’t designed to do that, I don’t throw them out. The simple act of wearing a garment adds comfort to them that a new garment can’t replace.

This has lead me into the prototyping stage and creating a series of experiments that I have tested on fabrics and garments to design with the knowledge I have gained. This includes fibres, fabric structures and stretching/shrinking processes. I have used a female size 8 block as a reference to see the changes occurring to the fabric during the experiments. From a design perspective I want to move away from the conventional pattern making techniques because I feel as though it could impose limitations on the final outcomes design. By stretching and shrinking the fabric I want to turn the perceived weaknesses of fabrics into strengths.

Presentation
- Development –I will be presenting a book that collates the readings, workshops, experiments, prototypes and blog posts.
- Blog- My blog has been a major part of my development with the two crossing over constantly. I have used my blog to document my research, but more importantly to reflect and work through future steps.
- Short video-The main focus of my research is process. I have chosen a video to collate my experiments and outcomes to explore another medium for me as a designer and to communicate the evolution of my experiments.
- Book- A series of experiments that I have completed with images. It will be both a way of documenting my processes and possibly act as a ‘how to’ for readers.
‘Final’ Pieces- I plan to create a series of garments that (at this stage) are tentative outcomes for the areas I have researched. By stretching and shrinking the fabric I want to turn the weaknesses of a fabric/garment into a strength. I will document the changes that may occur by deciding on a few experiments that I will repeat and record the results in a short video. It will also document the processes I have researched during the semester.
1- Stretching & Shrinking-a garment that has fabrics that will react differently under the experiments that are applied.
2- Comparison of fibres/fabrics- ie. a garment made with a Viscose Cotton knit and a Silk jersey, a garment made with a poly/cotton rib and tencel knit (depending on the number of fabrics I research the garment numbers are not specified)

Timetable
Week Day Date Task (to have completed by the date)
9 Mon 21/09 Investigated possible finishes to apply to garments. Researched lingerie/active wear.
Thurs 24/09 Work on communication proposal, decided on a suitable form of presentation (in keeping with the ‘science experiment’ concept that flows through my development).
Decide on the categories for the outcomes I want to explore for final garments.
10 Mon 28/09 Communication Proposal Due (on blog)
Thurs 01/10 Begin prototyping final pieces.

11 Mon 05/10 Collate important images that may be needed for the book and short videos I have taken of past experiments.
Thurs 08/10 Practice filming the process of one of the garments. Work through the stages of the video and decide on the content, duration and how I will film it. (May need to book a studio on level 7 to practice filming).
12 Mon 12/10 Upload a test of the video on blog.
Thurs 15/10
13 Mon 19/10 Simple layout of book (so I know what I need to include)
Thurs 22/10 Filming
14 Mon 26/10 Communication Proposal Due (on blog)
Thurs 29/10 Project Response Due (blog)
Draft of Book Due
Filming
15 Mon 02/11 Have filming completed, allowing me to work on editing the film.
Thurs 05/11
16 Tues 10/11 ASSESMENT

Constants-Blog, Recording (video) and producing prototypes.

Bibliography

-A primer on Oblque Stratagizing , 1997, “Brian Eno, interview with Charles Amirkhanian, KPFA-FM Berkeley, 2/1/80”, Gregory Taylor, viewed Wednesday 29/07/09

-Kawamura, Y 2005, Fashionology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies, Berg, Oxford and New York, pp.6 2005

In my quest to go ‘big’ I went with an idea Adele had involving escalators and fabric. The idea was simple.
1. Get person A to stand at the top of the escalator and hold one end of the fabric.
2. Get person B to hold on to the other end and step onto the escalator.
3. Try not to kill person A or person B.

I’ll admit that the third step was more of a given, but it may have turned out to be the most important step to keep in mind. I asked Hila and Fi to be person A and B for my experiment. It seemed to be going fine, but there was one critical step I should have thought about. Somebody needed to decide who was going to let go!
After a moment of panic Fi decided to let go (which was a good option) leaving Hila balancing on the always moving, always sharp and dangerous steps. This could have been a very different blog post if Hila hadn’t of been able to balance and save herself. Phew!

Stretching on escalator

Glad that I’m not having to write an obituary for a friend, I’ll just report on a few results.
The fabric I use had been boiled and put through the dryer before I stretched it.It was a cheap fabric from Spotlight-65% Polyester 35% Cotton. The experiment went well, however it still relied on the strength of the people holding the fabric which I hadn’t thought about. There needs to be a way of securing the fabric at the top, and on the stairs, yet even if you found a way, the steps would need to be controlled some way. As the escalators are automatic you couldn’t do that.
Another brief, and I repeat BRIEF idea I had was you could have one person holding a fabric outside the lift, one person in it and see if the fabric could stretch that way. I suggested it to Fi and Hila, not surprisingly they didn’t offer to participate in the next experiment.

Another little side project I had going in class was with my ‘suspected’ viscose knit. I purchased it from Rathdowne remnants and when I soaked the fabrics in boiling water for 30 mins, the blue dye ran everywhere. The staff said that there wasn’t any viscose knits but there may be some blends in the cotton section, so I picked out this fabric because of it’s silky touch.

The blue dye comming out of the washing machine.

I had this idea that instead of stretching the fabric in pattern form, I could stretch it while it was on the body. The pictures show the doubled top that the wearer could drop weights into, and gradually change the shape of the garment. Adele steered me away from this and just thinking back on it now it’s impractical to think that people would buy a garment that they have to put bricks, weights in. I know I wouldn’t.

Stretching the neckline on the stand

As the dress was on the stand, I started playing with the fabric and Adele saw how well that was working and suggested I run with different methods for stretch. There are many ways to actually stretch the fabric but they all have different results. I need to document this. Which brings me to my next point… recording. It would be great to have a small video to display these processes at the end of semester crit. So I’m going to start recording the experiments in the hope that I can collate it into a video.

In other design news I found an unlikely muse (unlikely in the exploratory sense) in Ashley Olsen. I was stealing a dose of much need Grazia goodness (stealing in the ‘I stole my friends copy of Grazia’ sense) and saw this image of Ashley in a white cut out Calvin Klein dress. When I got over my moment of sighing this was the conversation that went through my head (because this is how twisted my I’ve got lately) “I wonder what fabric that is? Silk/viscose/polyester, knit/sateen/two way knit etc. I hope Francisco hasn’t used viscose because that dress will drop and you won’t be able to see that cut out anymore”. That got me then to think, what if Francisco did make that out of a viscose knit and he had included the drop in his design? Straight away I went back to my American Apparel top and how the neck and sleeve lines had dropped due to the viscose. If you designed a garment with the ‘dropping’ in mind then each time you wear the garment it would look different. I’m glad I’ve had this brain wave and my Grazia time out wasn’t a waste. I’ve been stuck a lot with design possibilities, but I think this idea could work really well.

Ashley Olsen in Calvin Klein S/S 08
Source: Style.com

Ashley again
Source: Unknown

Calvin Klein S/S 08
Source: Style.com

Close up of runway image
Source: Style.com

Till next post…

Today was the crit.
The most helpful part of the crit was having to prepare for the crit, and getting the feedback. Writing is a really helpful tool for me, ever since Project last year when we had to write summaries each weeks work. This is why I find the blog so helpful. Writing out my speech allowed me to go back over the semesters work so far. Looking back over my blog made it really easy to see that path.

I didn’t think I covered everything in my speech, I left out a few things because I lost my way a bit. The feedback was really helpful and made me more certain about the direction I was heading. I was worried my concept was going to sound a little elementary. But it turned out o.k. The lovely Jeanne took some notes from the feedback for me. These were some of the suggestions I got back.
- Ask why-question why I want the stretching/shrinking. Don’t need to necessarily be disappointed in these outcomes, maybe I need to work with them. I need to stop trying to predict the outcome and go where the results actually take me.
- Mix fabrics-paper, plastic, shrunk wool against stretched cotton etc.
- Scale- it’s too hard to look at results from a small scale. Look into working on larger scales. I realize I haven’t gone far enough with the extremes of shrinking and stretching so that will be this weekend’s task. Working with patterns has allowed me so far to see the changes in the fabric, but I need to move away from the patterns because they are minimizing the possibilities in design. I think I said it in the previous post, but it’s really hard to move away from the ‘block’. There is a comfort in using the tried and tested methods of patternmaking, but to go back to the Brian Eno I need to keep in mind that it is easy to fall back into that trap. I need to remember, “don’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,” or “don’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude.”
- HACK! Just when you think you’ve left last semester’s hacking behind it comes back! I haven’t even thought about hacking since the start of the semester but I feel like –in the words of the great Celine Dion-it’s all coming back to me now. I suppose instead of hacking the image of fashion which was last semester’s research, I’m hacking into the fibres. Usually we try and avoid stretching and shrinking in clothes but I’m trying to open that up.
- Ricarda has suggested looking at Vionnet before and when I do the larger scale tests I’m going to look at letting the fabric drop naturally (without weights) just to see what happens.
- Another thing I just want to write down before I forget is stabilizers. Ricarda mentioned it a couple of weeks ago but I need to look into that.
- Something that Winnie mentioned and I didn’t quite follow but if anyone can remember that would be great. She talked about creating a matrix of fabrics. I might need to listen back to the recording.
- In terms of set out of my work I think I might take a ‘clinical’ approach. Adele told me that I was taking a ‘scientific’ approach to my working because of all the testing of fabrics. I might go with this a bit more and set out my research with a scientific edge i.e-have a hypothesis, conclusion etc. Excuse the lack of knowledge of a science experiment-it’s been a few years since I’ve written up a report so I’ll have to dig up my year 10 work!

I’m so glad I sat down and had a chat with Jeanne last week because she put me on the right track. I was just telling her how stuck I was and the problems I was having with my stretch idea. I was struggling because I wanted to stretch the fabric, but not when it was sewn or before it had been cut. Now that I think about it, it seems a little obvious but Jeanne suggested that I stretch the patterns when they were cut out. This set me on a good run and I started sourcing fabrics straight away. I went to Tessuti which looking back now may have been a bit of a waste because the first sew toile’s haven’t been very successful. In Thursday’s class I talked with Ricarda about the fibre’s and fabrics that I should be using. Basically I need something that has poor recovery. Looking at the Bonds singlet’s from the last entry I was going to need a rib structure, knits (although it depends what structure again), fibre’s like viscose, cotton, polyester etc.
I started by trying to weaken the fibre’s in the fabrics by boiling them. I put 10cmx10cm samples of each fabric in boiling water for five minutes. I was quite surprised that it didn’t affect the samples at all. Apart from being weaker when I tried to stretch the samples, nothing radical happened to the fabrics which left me rather underwhelmed.
Looking back at this experiment it was probably wasn’t going to do anything because the conditions weren’t extreme enough. So my next move is to put some of my samples into the washing machine on a high spin in hot water. Hopefully then I’ll see some major recovery issues with my samples!

These are the prototypes I have tried:
1. I’m told that this is a cotton fabric (courtesy of RMIT). I made up a basic long-sleeved top and then tried to stretch the pattern pieces by hand and used sand paper to try and damage the knit. It wasn’t ever tight fitting but it seems to have slumped back into place.

Before stretching (first sample)

After Stretching (First Sample)
2. I decided to test out my idea of stretching the fabric. So I shrunk the patterns by 70% on the photocopier and then tried to stretch the fabric in two different ways.
-The wool/modal blend was wrapped around a stretch machine that my Dad had in the shed. I’m not sure what it’s actually used for. I should have soaked the fabric in water first, it would have stretched more. When I sewed the garment up it basically was still at 70%.

The 70% pattern

Trying to stretch one of the 70% toiles over a size 8 mannequin

Left-Regular Right-70%

The Stretching machine

Stretching with the brick

-The wool/viscose blend didn’t work either. I soaked the fabric and created a hammock and used a brick to weigh the fabric down. Unfortunately the fabric has BRILLIANT recovery and didn’t do much!
3. The next blend I tried was a viscose/elastane. Instead of using the 70% patterns I decided to go with the stretch in the weft. In the previous trial I tried stretching the warp and weft, and the warp didn’t move an inch, so I decided go with the grain and shrink the length of the pattern. I did this on illustrator by scanning in the pattern, tracing it and then shrinking the length. I’ve just stretched the fabrics, haven’t sewn it together, but it seems to have stretched a bit more. Having said that the previous tests didn’t stretch, so I’m not sure that’s saying a whole lot.

Something that I am worried about is the design of the garments I want to produce. I don’t want a series of long-sleeved tops as my collection but it’s hard to design when you stick to the block. Ricarda and Adele suggested I move totally away from the block. When they said that the first thing that came to my mind was, well how am I going to get patterns to hand in? It’s stupid but old habbits die hard! The thought of moving away from the block or any patterns is completely foreign so I’m going to have to try and get over that. Eeeeee!

What next?
I want to try shrinking now, so I’m going to get close to my washing machine tonight! I’ve had a little chat with Diana and she gave me a few quick tips but hopefully I’ll get some more ideas when she emails me back.
I’m going to Sydney Road tomorrow to find some cheap, cheap, cheap fabrics! No more spending money on beautiful knits with beautiful recovery! Aaaaaggghhh!