The Construction of the final garment....

Through weeks of research and designing, it now come to producing the final garments. At first I thought we were going to sail through the day because all our patterns were completed and we knew the construction steps.

The Start of a long hard working day.

We thought we would tackle the skirt first as it seemed the least complicated of the two. Everything started out fine, we cut out the front and back panels then Amy being the strongest sewer of the group started sewing the darts that were going to create, we wanted to keep the whole process as professional as we could by pressing out the seams and panels. As separate panels I could already imagine what it was going to look like completed.

 As we started to join the front panels and back panels together we noticed the shape of the skirt wasn't coming together as we hoped, the fabric that we used (Bukram) didn't have the flexibility to create the clean lined shape we hoped for. After

evaluating this we figured out there was too many darts in the pattern, so we decided to go back to our original idea of two darts.

                                                                                                     

At this point I didn't think we were going to get both garments completed by the end of the day. To save time we decided that Dean would start on the subtraction cutting for the top, and me and Amy would concentrate on catching up with the skirt. Luckily we had enough material to start again. Once the pattern was adjusted back to the original plan the construction started to come together, and we made up some time.

We made the right choice in going back to the original pattern and using two darts the shape was coming together a lot better. As it was becoming closer to completion the final touches were starting to get more difficult for example fitting a concealed zip was more of a challenge than we realised, because the material was thick and we chose a full length skirt manoeuvring it on the sewing machine wasn't the smoothest. But with determination and hard work we finally got there with the skirt.

Subtraction Cutting.

As we had some complications with the skirt, Dean took it upon himself to tackle the top. With concentrating on the skirt I didn't get a chance to see the full process of the top come together. However the construction of the top went well, until it came to the lining, (we used a silk lining for the top because it was a nice weight and had a good sheer quality, and for the lining we used an organza). The lining was sewn the wrong way round so all the rough edges were on the outside. Usually this wouldn't of been a problem because we would be able to unpick the stitch and start again, but the material we used is very thin and with using an un-picker its will catch the fabric which will result in fraying. This had to be one carefully so prevent this happening as much as we could.

After this minor complication we finally finished the garment in time for our photo shoot.

  

As a team I thought we worked really well together and I am happy with the final outcome of both garments, they each individually reflect well from our research and we were able to incorporate innovation and interesting cutting techniques into the final design.