Digital Draping Journal #8 - Free Journal

DIGITAL DRAPING JOURNAL #8 - FREE JOURNAL

This week, our draping journal could be regarding any topic, so I chose to write about my progress on my project 2. For my project 2, I am draping a garment with influence from Charles James that fits into a collection with my partner's garment.

This is the Charles James (1937) velvet dress that I took inspiration from, and also the garment we reproduced in project 1.

Interestingly enough, I found these Charles James dress reproductions for sale that are meant for these "Modern Fashion Dolls". Along with numerous other dresses (including some more of James'), these sell for $100 - $300 and are actually quite detailed and well made! I find these doll garments very fascinating and it is nice how they are all historically relevant.

Check them out here:

http://sandrastillwellpresents.blogspot.ca/p/tom-sales_23.html

Here's my design sketch for project 2. As you can see, I took elements from the James' dress such as the structure of the cowls and the long, slim silhouette of the dress. The soft cowls in the neckline and sleeves connect with my partner's design idea in her dress. I will be using a soft but slightly structured wool fabric for this dress.

Firstly, I measured my mannequin and made a chart to compare these measurement to my own as I will be making the dress to fit myself. The bust was a good match to the size 8 mannequin, so I worked from there as my base. The waist needed to grow 5 cm, and even though the hips were too large, I left it as is because it's too difficult to change and not as relevant to the design.

I padded the waist with batting materials, and put a layer of muslin fabric over it. To smooth down the shape, I used masking tape all around the torso.

Here is the finished alteration to the waist. I measured to make sure that this alternation equaled my desired waist circumference. I drew in the CF, CB, SS, and princess seam lines. I also drew in a new waistline through my body's front and back waist length measurements.

I started with a light wool fabric to use as my test fabric to drape with. The advantage of this fabric is that there are some lines woven into it, making it easier to see the grainlines.

I started the drape with the cowls at the hips area. I decided to work with the lower body first, then work on connecting the upper and lower bodies together.

In order to form the cowl shape, I had to twist up the fabric into the cowl at a very sharp angle. This made the grainline for the cowl quite odd, but I focused more on the look of the cowl and didn't really care about grainlines.

Here is the first cowl positioned how I want it to look like.

Because of how weirdly the cowl twists the fabric, I decided to drape each cowl as a separate piece, and then later connecting the two parts together.

Second cowl closeup.

Third cowl, I did the same thing and pieced the sections together. I found that it was challenging to get all the cowls sitting at the same depth and have the same look. I am debating whether to make one cowl, and use the same pattern for the other cowls. Will this work? I will experiment further next class and see if it will.

I pinned up the top of the cowls closed because it's meant to close into a dart.

After drawing in all the cowl lines, waist line, folds, etc., I took off the fabric as I am now done half of the body drape.

Next class. I will open up my pinned areas to see how the inside of the cowls look. I hope that they are relatively even so that I can move forward with the next part.

I think that the challenge will be to seam the top and bottom sections together due to the bulk of the cowl folds. Also, I feel that the grainlines are quite messed up and different in every place, so I will also need to address this issue.