Monday, 3 June 2013

Constructing The Final Piece

My skirt and arm pieces are tube shaped to go around the arms and waist. I worked out that I'd be making my pieces in panels and stitching them together to make the wrap. I constructed my arm pieces and skirt in a similar process. I started by constructing the panels of fold and tucks separately. Before I could start putting them together I had to stitch lines of yellow down the folded pieces. Once I had all the components ready I had to begin putting it together. I pinned the folds into place and stitched them into a long line. When all together I used the over locker to finish the edge. My biggest concern was at this point where I wasn't sure how they were going to fix to the body. For the skirt I was thinking of just stitching the top to a long band of elastic but I thought it would look a bit naff. It was suggested that I make it fitted with a strip of fabric up the top and buttons to fix but I thought that was complicated to apply my folds to a straight edge at the top. It did inspire my idea to have a tube like fabric strip that would be fixed to the top with the folds out flat but in the tube I would have my band of elastic which would pull my folds back into their form. This was a great idea as the elactic in the band would scrunch the fabric tube into lines that I looked at previously with my stitching with elastic thread I did earlier in the project. For the arm bands however I stuck to using straight off elastic but I stitched on the inside to the lines in the folds so that the stitching wouldn't flatten out the folds. Once I had all the panels together and the fixing elastic in place I stitched the ends together to make the tubes and finishing the pieces.

I really like how my arm bands turned out and they are probably my favorite out the two pieces. I was a little let down by the look of my skirt at the end as through the process of making the folds didn't really hold in too well and lost some of their strength. That is probably a material problem or that the weight of the fabric was too much to hold. I know now for next time that I'd need to test out different fabrics in larger samples to see their strength.