Final MA presentation

Sorry that there have been few posts its been a chaotic two weeks, with the final push of work for the MA and Freshers beginning at work, so a week of Sunday night sick feeling!! mmh

Arriving at MMU at 7.30am to set our work up to find the whole corridor full of plan chests! We stayed calm.......

So a slightly manic morning deciding where things should go and then the 15 minutes presentation, after lunch, nerves were running high. So here are some images not the greatest quality and still not sure if it was all ok but too late now.

So two years all completed and not a hat in sight.

Then the rain came

Scotland invariably means a bit of rain otherwise it wouldn't look so lush and beautiful...It definitely rained today so I was glad that I did the stream shots yesterday but ever the experimentalist thought I would try again today with a very full stream. My river walking would have been quite hilarious if anyone had been watching as I tried to retrieve the dress!

not quite the limpid water of yesterday!

So the string broke with the current......

May need to go in the wash now.

Practice after the tutorial

Having mentioned my tutorial for the MA with Alice Kettle, one of her suggestions was to work on a broderie anglais dress that I have purchased from the high street. Purchased to reference the increased levels of manufacture and consumption at ever lower prices. The dress I have bought is fine white cotton with broderie anglais we checked its measurements to see if it had been made on the schiffli machine which it hadn't, also checked whether there was any repetition of slight flaws as to whether it was made on a multi head embroidery machine, this also seemed unlikely so it was possible that the dress that I had purchased in the sale for £11 had been hand machine embroidered using an Irish Machine, highly labour intensive.

So this brings into play a range of questions and observations, but how to draw this to others attention without it being information overload. The suggestion of small interventions in the garment or photographing in different context to make us look again. This is what I did.

In the stream

The water just sat on the surface even after 5 mins in the stream

New ideas

I have been reading the new book by Observer columnist Lucy Siegle about the real facts of production and cost cutting within the fast fashion industry, it makes enlightening reading.

There are many facts within the book that i would like to explore within my Needlewoman piece of work and given the fact that the same thing that happened here in the 1850's is happening in the Far East and we ignore it for the sake of our £4 T shirts I need to look to address this in some way.
So first ideas were to capture the garments in a different way.

15 minutes to sew a pair of 5 pocket jeans.

In the west we consume 55 kilos of new textiles every year.

We shall see where it goes from here......