Evaluation

As an overview I thoroughly enjoyed completing my final major project. The theme, journey, I believe I followed through appropriately I used it as a starting point by using my recent visit to London as inspiration by using my photographs of Old Bond Streets elaborate visual merchandising to spark ideas for my creative journey by creating illustrator drawings and prints from these images.

I developed my thoughts and ideas throughout the project by keeping up with regular posts on my blog, creating mood boards on Polyvore, playing with Illustrator and trying my prints in different types of fashion flats (shirts, clutches, suit linings etc) reading other menswear blogs, always referring back to my artist and designer research and my own photography and drawings. 

I gathered my research from my own photography, the internet, and knowledge from my contextual studies lessons. I always referred back to the London Collections website to find more influential menswear designers when I was feeling blank. My research really helped me in this project it was very relevant to what I wanted to design, and gave me lots of ideas of what i could put my prints onto. For example, Matt Booths work made me realise that I could do accessories rather than printing onto a shirt, his silk scalf collection inspired me to take my prints onto something I didn't initially consider and thus' I created a collection of menswear accessories with my print on.

I'm really pleased with my final outcomes, I thoroughly planned and was always thinking about this project and how I could take each of my ideas further. I feel I have progressed a lot from my last projects and tried really hard with this one and but a lot of time into it compared to my previous projects. I did have enough time I got everything done and handed in a day early, but say I had another 6 weeks on this project I would have liked to experiment more with my prints on fabric and do a professional photoshoot to show how my final pieces would be styled.

I did encounter numerous difficulties with sourcing my desired fabric for my final pieces. I wanted to print onto silk for my scalf as I wanted my products to be sold to a wealthy target market, but couldn't locate any 100% white silk in Blackburn or Clitheroe so I bought some muslin instead which I didn't end up using because the screen printing had too many flaws for me to be happy with it, so I digitally printed my scalf instead so it had no mistakes on it. For my clutch bag I wanted to use acetate, but it was incredibly difficult to sow with, I then decided to use clear PVC but couldn't locate any in the area and it was too late to order some online, so I used a white leather and used the computer embroidery machine on it to ensure the print was perfectly printed onto the bag. But the print wasn't spread across the whole of the bag as I wanted it to be, so I sporadically free stitched squares and rectangles onto it to soften the print out. I overcame a lot of construction problems as well by persevering and spending a lot of time and effort on keeping at it as I wasn't going to allow the quality of the bag to decrease. On reflection I am really pleased with how I managed the problems that arose and still resulted in a strong collection of accessories.