My latest project: Embellishment for Fashion!

My latest project for fashion was based on a trend of my choice. I chose to work to a cultural trend based on escalating fashion on travel!

Here are a few cheeky snaps of some work from this project!

So lets start with some drawing! I started by looking through photos galore, a great excuse to look through some of my own travel photos!

All background paper has been created by either screen pull through's (pulling through pure pigments, acids and procions, playing with colour and mark making! very messy and brilliant fun) and also mark making using different brush sizes and also paper towels and smearing it over the page! i also used some artificial flowers to make marks as well as the occasional hand print! 

 A Peruvian Woman, drawn in charcoal, with water colour.

 A Mehndi pattern, inspired by a selection of Indian images of mehndi henna tattoos.

 Possibly my favourite, an Indian man surrounded by some Aboriginal and Asian pattern! Such beautiful colours! Too exciting!

An African woman, i assure you she looks happy in the real image, not quite as scary as this!!!

 Various culture inspired patterns, colour, a cheeky man who i like to think is from Nepal (I don't know why...) and some stitching on to the paper and in with the pattern! And i didn't break my machine! phew...

 Beautiful little Asian girl! With some European inspired embroidery and some lovely bromeliads!

And now for the final embellished garment shapes! 

 This one is based on African jewellery! I wanted to do this with a modern twist, so used colours that perhaps meet a more western culture. I used bead work, stem stitch, straight stitch, back stitch, and satin stitch! This piece took me up to four days. The top itself has been dyed yellow, then dyed again with a pull through of pigments!

This piece took the longest and is probably my favourite of the four. It took about two weeks and is entirely hand stitched! The only thing that a machine was used for was to make the gold circles which have been done using water soluble paper and therefore are made entirely of gold thread! The elephants are each sewn with a different technique; The first on the left is simply a stem stitch, the middle was couching and the one on the right was a raised stem stitch, but very finely done.
The main detail of the hands were done using beading, a very delicate chain stitch, stem stitch, back stitch and satin stitch! The outside detail is stem, satin and back stitch, each layer being a different stitch!
The back ground again has been done using a pull through with a mixture of pigment and procions.

 This piece is possibly my least favourite. I wanted to bring in more to the colour scheme i had and thought i could do this through another culture. The main body of the top is based on Peru, and i wish i had stitched in to it further neatening up the painted background. This was done through a pull through, painted on to the screen, then painted on to the fabric itself to brighten the colours using all pigment. Exciting though it was, I'm not sure how successful this piece is.
The beading is quite simple but i thought it would be good to use more ethnic looking beads.
I also used some ribbon work and simply sewed squared using a red ribbon, which took quite a lot of stress and pricking of fingers! 

I pleated the top of the dyed fabric and sewed it on to give it a bit more to it but again, I'm not so sure of how well this has worked.

 And for the last garment! This was unfortunately mostly done by machine which i do not like to do. I think embroidery looks best when done by hand as it is more personal, and more beautiful. I also don't like the lack of control i feel when i use a machine, but that's just me!
So here we have another pull through dyed fabric and a tunic dress shape with a collar that has been sewn using machine stitches (zig zag and straight stitch using different lengths) and also some tambour beading and tambour stitches (as its quite beautiful just using the stitch without sequins or bead work)
There is some hand embroidery within the machine just to give it that extra lift.

 I used free hand machine embroidery, and a combination of zig zag and straight stitch playing with the length and widths of the stitches to make lines and shapes of different thicknesses. And of course some Hand embroidery, i wonder if you can pick out which is hand and which is machine?

So there we have my last project, a fun one and rich in fabulous content but how successful do you think it was, i wonder!?