Structure and Attachment | Final Garment, The Making

The making of my actual final proved to be quite stressful, I encountered many problems with my fabric, unfortunately as it was a heavy fabric it was really difficult to work with. This ended up breaking 4 needles on my sewing machine, and many trial runs. In hindsight, I should have bought two fabrics and done test-run's on both to see which worked better.

The fabric's thickness first became an issue when attaching the sleeves, after my previous mishap on my toile of attaching the sleeve inside-out, I was extra careful with my final. The sewing machine took a few attempts at getting through the fabric, and I started to get really frustrated. Because of this, and due to my decreasing needle's I decided to step back from the making and focus on other parts of the project to collect myself.

My main issue was with how heavy the neck was, once the fastenings are added this hopefully shouldn't be such an issue. Originally I designed the coat to have over-sized buttons, but after going back through my designs I thought that dainty would work better. The design is so structured and unfitted that I felt it needed something smaller and more feminine to pull it together as a conceptual womenswear piece. After the fabric dilemma, I decided on buying two fastenings so that I could chose which one I wanted, hooks and eyes or lace up with embroidery thread.

- without the Shoulder piece or fastenings

I made a few examples of what the shoulder piece could look like out of my fabric, and played around holding them against the basic frame of my final garment. As the fabric was too thick I couldn't actually pin them onto it which was annoying, but instead I used tailors chalk and marked out where they could go. This worked well, and was an easy way around the fabric problem. 

Despite all the problems I encountered during the making, I actually have really enjoyed making something that is completely my own, with my own chosen fabric. I am so excited to shoot this piece. I don't want anything complicated for the shoot of this, as I feel it's interesting enough to hold it's own. Any inspiration will be taken from my previous shoot, this will include the make up and the hair. I don't want any props and I want the backdrop to be stark and white. Taking Horst into consideration, I hope the final images are structured and bold, with clear lines and interesting negative spaces.