the last year was such a whirlwind. especially the last 6 months. i guess bumming off last winter was really not the best decision i’d made in my life!! i don’t think there are words to describe how stressed out we all were. besides making my thesis collection, we also had to deal with other classes. i had liberal arts classes as well as a business class and a digital class.

repeat after me: not. fun.

there was too much on my plate and nothing much i could do about it.

the biggest question i have is this: the fashion program in parsons is seriously crazy and the phrase “slave driver” is too easy a phrase to describe how it is. we have so much more to do than the other programs at parsons, and our hours spent in class is way longer, and we definitely have more to do after class. and yet, for 18 hours of class a week, our core classes are only worth 8 credits?? it’s usually a credit an hour. how does that make sense??

so you can understand how much of a celebration it is that this bullshit is now over. overrrrrrr!!! hallelujah praise the lord!!! i’d never given thanks to god as much as i did when i graduated. i mean, i honestly don’t know how i made it through.

there were so many times when i was seriously on the verge of basically failing out of school. if i’d failed out of school at this stage when i simply couldn’t tolerate another day of it, it would have been worse than dying and going to hell.

all work and no play makes jack a dull boy

and yes. i was a dull boy. girl. it. i mean, i wasn’t much of a living thing!!! i was mostly what you might call a zombie!

during the fall semester last year, we were basically supposed to have finished the samples and fittings for all our garments, and basically get everything as ready as we could to get started. and at the start of the spring semester this year, we were to go straight into working in our actual fabrics, adjusting our patterns if needed, making sure they were perfect, cutting the fabric, sewing everything up, more fittings on the models, and then finishing the garments to make sure it looked great inside and out.

sounds so easy right? it’s crazy how all those words fit into 1 lousy paragraph, when actually doing it required months of hard work and days of no sleep!

there were a lot of preparations. sewing is probably the easiest part. after you’ve draped, if you need to drape, working on the patterns takes a while, especially if you have the exact vision of the kind of silhouette you want in your head, and if you have crazy seam lines. when i slash a pattern diagonally for example, and put a seam in there, it might take several tries to make sure the line goes exactly where i want it to go. which means making the patterns, making sure everything matches on paper, cutting and sewing the fabric, and then trying it on the model so make sure the lines are where i want it to be.

one might wish there was some sort of magical photoshop for fashion design when you can just select a line and adjust it with a mouse, and have it changed in 3 seconds.

it’s times like this that i wish i was 1.) a witch aka someone cool in harry potter. i don’t care if i am true-blooded or a muggle, i wanna be able to wave my wand and have something happen fast. alternatively, 2.) i wish i was mega rich and had the cash to hire some sweatshop workers in my own little studio. sweatshop workers, elves that work at night, same thing. of course, i’ll be a nice boss.

of course.

then comes the menial work

the things that take the most time are really not what you think it might be. yes, pattern making and draping did take a while to get them done exactly.

but you know what really takes forever? fabric treatments. yes. which is basically a fancy term for things you do to make your fabric look fancier than it would if you just went to a store and bought it.

that, and finishing a garment. some people do their linings and other finishing with the sewing machine. i hate that. i like how old-fashioned hand sewing looks. but yes, it does take a while to get done. and when it’s all finished, you are rewarded with a neck ache, stiff shoulders and a back that hurts so you can’t stand straight.

for this collection, i was mixing so many different coloured fabrics. i had different shades of blue-green jersey, a really colourful orange and blue ikat cotton, different types of tweeds, and so on.

so i thought, why not push it over the edge and do something that can’t be found anywhere else? part of my thesis concept was the processes of growing up, with the themes of dependency and tension. we grow up dependent on our family and friends, and as we go older, we pull away from them and those turbulent teenage years are filled with so much tension. as we learn to let go, we realize that we still cannot and should not break off from what really matters, and so we remain dependent on our family and friends for all sorts of support – emotional, psychological, and so on.

what sort of fabric treatments could possibly express all these?

weaving. ta-da! smart eh? *chuckle*

the way that the warp and weft work (vertical and horizontal threads of fabrics, and especially woven fabrics), is completely  based on the idea of dependency and tension. the strings pull from and off each other, and yet they depend on each other because without one another, they would be just strings!

so weave i did! a weave it was! oh yeah!!

i found a studio in manhattan that allowed me to just sit there and weave as much as i wanted to. i didn’t do those conventional types of weaves, heck no. i pulled on the strings, stuck my fingers in places i shouldn’t (oops!), threw pieces of wools in there, added fibers from the goodie basket (essentially a basket filled with scraps of cut strings). it was such an expressive and inventive emotional process that i really enjoyed. i took my time with it to really bring out some good texture. i did a black palette and also a really colourful palette, just so i had enough to let me go home and seriously decide on which i wanted to go ahead and use.

and here on one of my jackets, i used part of the weave in its front placket. what do you think? i added all the different colours of the fabrics that i was going to use in the jacket, so i think that the colours in the weave really sort of pulls everything together in a really weird way. i feel like something is so “off” about the whole jacket, and yet somehow i think it works. hopefully, people think so too?? haha.

this jacket was one of my trickiest pieces, and only because of those wild lime green drapes that i chose to do on the sides. you know, i think i draped and cut these stupid things like, 7 times in different types of fabrics. and no matter how perfect they were each time, they really wouldn’t work. (patterns, if you haven’t caught on, are the 2d pieces of paper you use to cut the fabrics.) after cutting out each piece, i still had to pin it to the jacket, then adjust and sew, then attach the next part, adjust it on the jacket, pin and sew…..

i mean, dammit that took forever!! and by the end of it i wanted to stomp on those damned drapes and rip them apart.

not even joking.

model fittings

i think part of the fun are the model fittings. or perhaps that’s the masochist side of me saying that. i usually hold my breath until i realize that my garments actually do hang ok on the models. by that time i usually turn blue and am a nervous wreck.

the thing is, it’s not a fun process to undo any part of a garment that is already done, only to go back and tighten or loosen it by like, a quarter of an inch. thankfully, because i was really careful in taking the fit models’ measurements and made sure my patterns were good at the sample stage, i didn’t have any major adjustments to do in my final garments.

the most painful adjustment i had to do was with my diagonal pants that you see on anna here.

because i had a thin wool suiting, spandex and jersey all mixed in the diagonal pieces, it made it pucker in the center seam at her butt and i had to basically take off the waist band, undo a whole lot of annoying threads and redo about 40 different steps just to take in about half an inch.

i would have preferred to start all over from scratch which would have been faster, but too bad i didn’t have enough fabric for that and i wasn’t gonna go spend more money buying more.

ooh.

and this is the ikat cotton shirt where i used more of that weaving technique, in the shirt bib!

these are a few of my favourite things

i have a few favourites within my collection. and here are two of them. remember that hot balloon sketch that i drew? well here it is again in case you don’t… (it has been a long time, i know.)

well i got it printed on jersey, which is what those t-shirt materials are called. doesn’t it look fancy? i was so happy when i opened the package. however, i realized when i was cutting it out that the print company probably made a mistake – i wanted the print to be about 4 times bigger than what it turned out to be. but too late; it was late in the game and my own fault for not getting it done earlier, and i had no time to wait for them to redo it, so i just zoomed on ahead!

i did about 2 hundred pin tucks and then cut them and added those pieces into the shoulders of the romper, which created a really nice texture and definition to the shoulders here. the highlight of this romper, is that it can be worn in multiple ways. the last i tried, i think 6 ways are possible. i included many different armholes and necklines, so you can stick your head and arms through whichever hole you wanted, and playing with the garment creates all sorts of different silhouettes! fun!

another favourite piece of mine is this ikat bubble dress. this was finished so last minute, it didn’t make it to my photoshoot. which was bad and so i have to redo that shoot!

here’s a picture of when i threw it onto my body/form/mannequin/whatevs, to check its proportions. again, that head scares me but i needed it for some hats and hoods i made.

ohhhhh and wait for this! shoes!!

you didn’t think i wouldn’t, right? i brought my sketches down to a great shoe maker, and look what they made for me!!

the one problem i have with this, is that the collar didn’t really turn out the way i wanted it. i tried to explain it to them in dressmaking terms, but they sewed the collar down so it doesn’t really “pop” up like a shirt collar, and is instead sewn flat down. hmm. but no big worries, because i can fix it and make it better!

yes i can!

Tagged as: parsons, rêvasseur, senior thesis