Wires Crossed

I had a discussion with Ricarda in class and showed her the 'stay' prototype that I wrote about in the previous posts. She looked a little confused when I showed her the dress and then explained her definition of 'stays'. I made myself look a little foolish but once I understood what I had to do I was interested to see the results. This is the result.
I used a elongated singlet pattern, and attached 'ribbons' of calico over the singlet by sewing the ends. They were placed in different directions and the pattern was cut with the warp running across the pattern.

Using stays

You can see from the image that after the stretching some of the stays weren't needed because the fabric didn't stretch in that direction. The only stays that had an effect were the ones that were going in the same direction as the weft. It's good when you get results like this because it makes you realise how much you can jump into design without thinking things through or taking into account simple things. So when I do my next design it will be much more considered.

Another experiment I did was going back to one of my origy-didgy ideas. I wanted to stretch patterns before I sewed them to see what effect it would have. Because the original idea was trialed with the 70% patterns they were quite simple, and as we now know, pretty much don't stretch! So I created a pattern that was cut up into different design lines, having an idea how each pattern would stretch if cut in a certain direction. The patterns were mostly cut in the weft or bias with the shoulders being the only patterns cut on the warp.

Left:stretched, Right: original pattern

The image above shows how much the pattern distorted after the fabric was stretched. Notches were very useful but as I learned you actually needed to mark the notches with a texta. Once the pattern was stretched the snipped notches couldn't be seen because they stretched.

Front
Back

Side

The process of pinning the patterns together was quite long because the fabric rolled at the edges and was difficult to handle. Some of the patterns cut on the weft had edges that no longer matched up the bias cut patterns because the stretch was to great. These had to be stretched as I sewed and created the gathered effect that you can see particularly on the back of the dress. The bias patterns twisted the design and the weft patterns lengthened the design which created this warped effect that was unexpected.

I began another prototype which was just cutting out the patterns in the weft direction. This was interesting because all the patterns could be stretched to match each other.