After a beautiful day yesterday, today is a little cold and miserable. Traffic outside is slow going but there have been a couple of people who have come due to word of mouth. It’s great to have a little conversation with passers by about exhibition. A few people were curious as to why I chose to use the paper dress rather than the neoprene prototype, they thought it would be more effective to have that in the space. The concept for the container was to show the methods I followed in designing the collection, rather than showing just the collection. Everyone has an opinion or comment and I think the week will give me the opportunity to find the best way to explain my work in simple terms -which is the hardest thing. This environment forces you to think on your feet, and reflect back on the process that led me to this point. I’m still working on my exhibition at night, getting more printing ready, and hopefully I’ll have my flip book that I can use to help illustrate my process and explain my concept.

After all weekend setting up today I finally opened for business. It’s quiet at RMIT because of the mid semester break, but Bowen St still has people walking through not quite sure of what to make of the big container on the basketball court. I was so tired after the weekend. All the build up to the exhibition and setting it up made me want to be totally done with the whole thing. Even though I’m sitting here with not much to do, it’s good to have people come through and hear their thoughts about everything from the container to the work itself. The basketball kids probably don’t want a container in their way and passers by seem to be curious as to why it’s plonked at RMIT. Some people just walk by and turn their head to look, others come a little closer and some people take a peek inside. There have been a lot of jealous teachers from RMIT wanting to know how we got the container. So hopefully it’s an idea that catches on and other students can display their work in this format. Someone wanted the container for a music studio, which I thought would be pretty cool.

I didn’t take into consideration the interaction that I would have with people. It’s not a gallery, it’s a container on a basketball court so it’s open to everyone that walks by. This suits me because I’m getting a range of opinions from young tafe boys to teachers from other design departments. Day one down…

Over the weekend we’ve all been moving into our containers. I had some great help from my family, especially my dad who was there all weekend making it happen. I wanted to quickly upload some behind the scenes photos from the weekend. Now for the exhibition!

The colour of the paper dress is something I need to decide asap so Caz knows what colour card to construct the accessories in. I mentioned how important colour will be in the exhibition a few posts back. I don’t think having it in white will work against the back drop of the photo shoot, so black will be the best option. Thinking about how much impact the hairspray had on the shoot, I had an idea to maybe include thaton the paper dress. Just having the black dress may not highlight the links and loops, so when I sprayed the sample with the pink I was really happy with the results. The effect highlights each loop and adds an injection of colour to the garment. I’ll ask around for more opinions but I think this could work in the exhibition.

Yesterday we had the shoot for the exhibition. I’d never done a photo shoot before so I was nervous about the day. It went really well and Jake (photographer) was so helpful directing the shoot, I can’t wait to see some of the photos. Amelia’s makeup was great and once we sprayed Emily’s hair with the pink hairspray it seemed to give us more to play with in terms of styling and poses. The pink hair against the black dress created a great contrast.

Today I was working on Illustrator and playing around with the files to figure out the best way to print the final image. I wanted to find a way to customise the tile size for printing. Instead I found a better way, using artboard’s to create a grid of the print area. Artboard’s are similar to pages, you can create multiple artboards in different sizes or use the same size in a grid. It was exactly what I needed and I guess I’m just lucky that I have CS4. From what I’ve read it was a new feature Adobe added to the version. I printed a trial at home and so far everything is lining up really well. There are a few images below of the trial. As the image is blown up so large, up close there are beautiful areas of coloured pixilated squares that when you step back from the knit, you don’t notice. It reminded me of my work in first semester third year, where I pixilated images to extract design lines.

Hopefully now it’s just a matter of inserting the chosen image in the file; printing, cutting the shapes, connecting the links and knitting the whole piece. I’m going to organise a ‘BYO scissors night’ with family and friends to help me cut out the loops. This weekend will be basically preparing for next week so any trouble-shooting will be sorted and work set up so I can use the week to assemble elements of the exhibition. Fingers and toes everything runs smoothly. Seriously I’m crossing everything!