Esoteric Illusions

So for my Professional Practise module I am a part of a group of 10 Bath Spa students are putting on an exhibition in Walcot Chapel. We’ve spent the past few months planning and designing the posters, flyers and now it’s only 2weeks away. So now I’ve actually got to finish some work to put in it! I’m going with my Alice in Wonderland work. I’m going to get my blue dress finished by adding some embroidery around the hem. Then when I go home the weekend before we put up the exhibition me and my sister (who studied Photography at PCAD) are going to have a mini photo shoot in the woods by our house, so I’ll have some photos of the dress in context to hang next to the dress in the exhibition.

So everyone come along and see some great work from the creative arts students of Bath Spa! Hope to see you there!

Embroidered flowers, a closer look

There’s a limited amount of embroidery detail on the dresses of Alice but I’ve come across an embroiderer Pat Trott. Some of her main work involves creating 3D flowers out of stitch and it’s just when I see this image (of the garden of living flowers) I just think that this technique could be used effectively but yet still be subtle on a costume dress for Alice.

Pat Trott was introduced to embroidery by her mother and hers before her, the passion for it was almost passed down as well. She now teaches workshops and also at schools and colleges to share her embroidery. She has her 17 ‘techniques’ which can then be combined to make a number of different flowers as seen here. The same stitch can be used with different threads and sizes to create different effects and in her book Three-Dimensional Embroidery stitches she explains a shows them all so that anyone can create them as well.

What I like about this style is that I haven’t seen something like it before, and that I can now very easily recreate them myself. Obviously floral is probably one of the main subjects of detail when it comes to textiles but it’s the way the embroidery sits on the fabric, it’s raised which I kind of like.

On a dress for Alice I think perhaps the singular flowers could work as perhaps a border, or maybe a smaller image like this one but just on a pocket and then others dotted around, blending in but still bright enough to catch your attention.

Playing around with some playing cards

In photos like these you can really appreciate the time and energy spent in creating such an elaborate dress, with so many layers of netting it must have to keep its shape along with the little details that I’d never noticed till I’d never even seen these close up shots. That this dress is covered in hearts and daises, I really like the effect of the darker lines on the slightly opaque fabric which adds in the black and white but means that the red is still the strong main colour of the dress and is shown through. I also like that there’s a sketch of the design for the Queen of hearts costume shown behind Alice’s dress while it’s being exhibited, this shows where the main inspiration came from for this particular costume.

Here I’ve taken the shape of this Alice dress but then been making it my own. So I’ve been experimenting some more with taking aspects of playing cards and using the symbols and colours as inspiration for some dresses. I like the embroidery of heart and spades etc on the ribbons; I’d like to then apply them criss-crossing over the body of a dress and draping over the skirt.

So I’m defiantly going to continue with this theme of working as everyone is familiar with the character of Alice wearing the pale blue dress and an Alice band in her hair however, for Tim Burton's film costume designer Colleen Atwood wanted to create something new, with no disrespect for the older designs, but I think especially for this film during the plot when Alice is staying with the Red queen, all of her attendants are dressed in the same colour scheme (of black, white and red) and so I think here’s a reason to try Alice in some new colours. It’s a very lavish dress, it’s been made for the purpose to be fit for Alice being in the presence of a queen and I think that this dress is the one that most of all fits with the others from the earlier photo shoot. It’s not something you’d wear every day, but something to help her get into being the character that she has to put on, and it helps her become who she has to be in order to get what she needs.

Disney Joy

It’s nearly 100 days till I spend my summer working in Walt Disney World resort Florida for 3months so anything Disney related catches my eye at the moment and so with my Alice project on the go I feel that I can make it a bit more rounded by looking at other Disney tales as well only when it crosses into the fashion or costume world. 

Yesterday while on the train I saw the person next to me reading the paper beholding this image so it caught my eye but couldn’t really see what it was about, I assumed that it was an advertisement for a theatre production, however after researching I’ve discovered that it’s for a photo shoot by Annie Leibovitz, who also took the photo’s for an Alice in Wonderland shoot which I studied recently for a power point presentation. So I found it interesting to look through some more Disney breaking into the fashion world.