Week Five

Purple file

This week I have started to put together my purple file, which is where we have to look at a problem, and look into things which are needed to help solve it. For mine I am going to look at opening a fashion business. In the file we need to look at strategic planning, which would be to look at business plans. We also need to look into funding, so I can research into different grants and funding options. And the last thing I need to research into is training, so I am going to research into different courses that you can do to help set up a fashion business. To cover the modules we have got to look into all of these areas and then concentrate on one of them to write a written response. I am going to look in a book called how to set up a fashion label, it is a really good book which talks about all different aspects of running your own business. I have also ordered another fashion business book from Amazon so hopefully there will be a lot of information I can look into. As well as looking into the business bits such as money and planning, I can look into which shop I would like, and where I would like it to be. The exciting things such as how you want it to look inside will make the file seem more interesting. There is a really good program on the computer called mock shop which is what visual merchandisers use to plan the layout of different shops. It would be really good to do something like this for the file. But I think the program is way out of my price range. There is no price on the website. I could use Photoshop to do some kind of mock up instead. I can also make some promotional material for my shop such as labels and bags. I think that if I do this file well, I will be able to take it to Nottingham Trent university if I get an interview as it is the type of thing that they would be looking for. They do projects on this type of thing, and when I looked through some work at the open day, they had planned something such as a range of jeans. They had then shown where they would go in a shop, and how they would promote them.

De Montfort

I applied for a retail buying course at De Montfort University after seeing the work at graduate fashion week. I have had a date through for an interview, but I haven’t ever been to the university so I wasn’t sure whether I would like it there or not. And at the interview if they asked me why I wanted to go there, I wouldn’t know what to say. So I went to the open day to look around and look more at the course. The course sounded good, if you was started from year one. But for me, I think I would struggle to fit in. They look at things such as the technical testing of fabrics and garments, and I wouldn’t know anything about this. There were quite a lot of things in the first year that I wouldn’t know never mind the second year. I spoke to the woman who was talking through the course, and told her I wanted to go into the third year, she said that they sometimes let people into the second year, or very rarely into the third year. She wrote down the things I would need to show that I knew to get accepted into the second year, and I don’t know enough of it. I think I would have to do the whole course from the beginning. I wasn’t much for the university either. When I went to other open days I got a better feeling. I don’t think I will be going for my interview as I wouldn’t want to go there and I don’t think I have much chance at all of getting in.

I have been struggling with my work lately and have been looking at my research to come up with shape within them which I cut out of paper. I showed the photographs on week fours blog. These did work, but I got stuck with what to do next as I wouldn’t be able to cut them out of fabric without having a laser cutter. The cut out shapes that I did remained me of stencils so I thought, well why not do some printing? Maybe I will come up with some ideas I thought. So I made some more stencils of the shapes that I had before, the circles and triangles, and a couple of new ones and off I went to the heat press. I used black and brown ink as these were the closest colours to my project, everything else was really bright. The inks didn’t come out very strong though. Some of the black prints looked almost green. The colours did still match my work though so it wasn’t a disaster. I used different papers, fabrics, and a faux leather to test out which worked best, the prints were ok, but nothing special. The faux leather worked well, as did the papers. The leather that i had was blue so i used the wrong side of it which was white. It was very plasticy, and the dye came out darker on this then on the paper and fabrics. The problem with doing printing is it is really flat. What can I do next with them? I wanted to make something more sculptural. I could go back to these after I have come up with some sculptural shapes and use the printing within them. But at the moment I do not want to carry on with the printing. I need to look more at my research and go back to my brief to come up with some ideas for how to make some sculptural samples.