Week Fourteen

This entry is slightly more of a day entry then a week as I have got to send off my work so that it is printed in time. I am having my journal entries put into a book. I have been adding in the pages for a while now, it takes quite a long time to get it looking good but I am really pleased with it. It is sort of a project diary. Well, anyway, so far this very short week, as today is only Tuesday, I have finished another file. One of the files is to look at the next five years and plan where it is we would like to be at the end of it. Next year I will be in Nottingham. Well I think I will be! But I am pretty much set now on going there. I have been offered a place on their one-year top up course, which is called International Fashion Business. It looks a really interesting course. I like that at the end of it, past students have got all different jobs out of it. Some have become stylists, some work as retail managers, some are working in buying and merchandising roles and some have gone on to do postgraduate study. The plan we have written isn’t set in stone but it has got me thinking about where it is I would like to be. Five years seems such a long time, but I have been at Newcastle College now for four years and it has gone so fast. For the five-year plan I looked at doing an MA course at Nottingham after I have graduated with my full degree. If you stay on at Nottingham to do an MA, you can apply for some money to help with the costs. Without this I am not sure I could afford to do it unless I did it part time over two years and worked as well. After this I would like to go on and work for a company. This would be at a junior level. At the minute I am not sure what this would be doing. There are so many jobs that sound interesting, but until I have done the course, and learnt new things I am not sure where it is I want to be. Whatever it is I want to work my way up and become successful. The fashion industry is always changing, and so many of the jobs you need to work you way up, start from the bottom gaining experience to move forward. I think if you ever got board there would be room to switch and change. There is just over a week left now until the hand in day. I need to complete my practical work, which is to make some more dresses. I need to have another tutorial with a lecturer to see what is going with my garments at the exhibition else I am not sure how to complete my work. I have got a lot of different things I could include in the show so I want to make sure I choose the right things. I like my photographs of my samples, but I am not sure whether they go with the white paper of the dresses. I also need to sort out what rail it is I am having in the exhibition and find some good quality hangers. Hopefully it will be done on time!

Week Thirteen

This week I think I have fitted quite a lot into the time. I have managed to get two paper dresses made for the show. I don’t think they are brilliant, but I haven’t got much time at all, and so many things have changed with my exhibition plans, that if I have a show it will be a miracle. I thought I was going to make three dresses, but now I think I will have five, so I only need to make two more which shouldn’t take much time. They look a bit boring on their own, just being white paper, I am not sure whether to use some brown paper, or some other materials with them. I could print onto them but I am worried this would take up a lot of my time as the stencils I used before to sample, took a while to cut out. For some samples I made some stencils out of paper, cutting out shapes using a craft knife, and then used ink on the heat press and printed onto fabrics and papers. The paper samples came out better then the fabric as the colours stayed nice. Sometimes when you print, the inks change colour due to the fibres in the fabric. If I have enough time, and have got the dresses made to fall back on I could print up some paper and make about two more dresses and see how they look. Then I could choose the best ones out of all of them for the exhibition. I want to put some labels and tags onto the garments to make them look like they are on a shop rail. I made some out of wire mesh, photographs and papers and they look quite good. I need to add sum text onto them, maybe using some acetate and layering this up with the other materials. The tags look good but I am not sure yet how well they work with the dresses. With the dresses being all white, and the tags brown and copper colours, I am not sure if it looks right. Maybe once I make some more garments using different papers it will match in better. I have put the paper dresses on a clothes rail for the moment while they are being made to hopefully stop them getting ruined, I want them on a rail for the exhibition but the one I have got looks a bit flimsy. This has helped me to work out how many garments I need though, and what type of rail will work. I think that five garments will work best. Four of them are not enough, and six too much. Amy had a look at my rail with some of my images blown up from the photocopier behind, to try and work out what would work for the exhibition. I said to Amy how I want to have a shop window display feel to the show, and not just some paper dresses on a rail. She told me to mock up some ideas to see what we will need. I’m not sure what it is I need to turn it into a shop window display. I want it to look interesting, and have a fine art feel. A display that is about fashion, but not necessarily something you can wear or buy. I will have to do some research and draw up some more ideas and have another talk with the lecturers, but this has helped me to see how it’s looking. Last time I had an exhibition tutorial and Noel looked through my work, he wanted to see some of my illustrations blown up to see whether they worked large scale. I printed some off on A3 paper to stick them up and see how they looked. I stuck them up in two different ways to see how I could have them printed. With big gaps in-between, and some close together. I’m not sure whether I like them or not when they are blown up. My illustrations are small, but blown up I am worried you can see mistakes in them. Amy thinks they look good but I am not too sure. I have got some other images, photographs or drawings, so I think I need to see what else could work for the exhibition. This week I have also got my yellow and purple file completed. The yellow file is to look back through our old journals and see how much we have learnt over the course. I looked through some of my journals and have re-reflected on them, I noticed that I didn’t write much about things and could have explained more about a lot of things, so hopefully I do this now. I think that when I am writing the journals though I tend to do them quite quick and chatty and forget to say everything as I think everyone already knows what it is I have been doing. I forget that someone reading my journal may have just picked it up for the first time. My purple file is about setting up a fashion business. I decided to look into how I would go about doing this, and planned what type of things it is I would need to do. I looked into funding, training and planning. There are a lot more different things that you need to learn about to do with business. I didn’t realise how many different things there are to deal with then planning to start up. I have written the report to go with it and just need this to be checked over to check it is containing the right information. I am glad these two files are out of the way so that I have got time to do the others. I need to start the blue file, which is a five-year plan, and then add some more information to the green one, which is planning the exhibition. On Wednesday, I had an interview at Salford University for the third year of their Fashion course. This was a waste of time. They have only ever taken on one person into the third year and she was from Central St Martins (which means she was good!) I am not sure why they ask people for an interview if they don’t take people on in different years. They asked me if I would go into a lower year, and I said that I wouldn’t go below year two. But really in my head I new I wouldn’t even do this. I have been offered a place on a one-year course at Nottingham Trent, which looks really good so I wouldn’t do two years somewhere else. They were a bit rude about my work, and I wasn’t too pleased with their attitude, as they had asked me there for an interview when really there was no point. They said my portfolio was very unusual, and they said that they didn’t know what work was mine and what wasn’t. I am not sure what they meant about this but everything in my portfolio is my own work, I have got research of other people work in files and sketchbooks, but that is to go alongside my own to show what has influenced me. Nottingham seemed a lot more impressed with my work, so I think even if they had offered me third year I would have gone to Nottingham, as they seemed much nicer. They asked me about second year, but I don’t think I was giving out much of a good vibe, as by then I felt they didn’t want me so we just sort of agreed that I wouldn’t go there. It was probably a good thing that I went to the interview though, as it is experience. I felt as though they were criticising my work, but then they said how they would definitely have me on first year, but wasn’t sure about second just due to the fact that by second year you need to do either styling, or fashion and the woman said she wasn’t sure which I was. She said if in the second year you did both I would defiantly be able to do it. This is where I could have said a lot more and let them know what it is I am good at and why they should have me, but I just didn’t feel strongly enough that that’s where I wanted to go. Which is strange, as I have wanted to get into Salford for the last three years!