Today I went on a trip with my university to Graduate Fashion Week. It was great to see what other students had achieved and all the unique ideas they had come up with. I could see that so much hard work had gone into their portfolios and their work gave me a better idea of what to expect in my third year. I even got to chat with a couple of graduates about their time at university and even some advice about what I can expect over the next two years. So it was a very useful trip and I feel that I learnt a lot.

I am very happy with how my shirt turned out.

I used the face of my muse to create a head for all my designs. I thought this would fit in perfectly as she’s my target market and the type of person who would be wearing these clothes. In the designs I played around with the flowers I had already decided on; making them darker to blend in with the fabric and altering the size and placement. I wanted the flowers to look delicate and not too bold. I also used pin-tucks/stripes in a lot of the designs as this is something I took from my nurse moodboard. Also sticking to the nurse brief I also kept with the main blue colours, adding small random splashes of colour to brighten it up. Flowing and see-through fabrics are common in clothing by the Kooples so I incorporated this in many designs as well.

Here are the two moodboards I created for my portfolio. These two pages show the secondary research I gathered based around my brief. On the first page I have included a little booklet on the importance of sustainability, some images of flowers/floral prints, clothing by the Kooples and my muse. On the second page I included the second part to my brief; 1950s nurses’ uniforms. I put a lot of similar images on this page but they all said something different. I only gathered photos taken from this time of nurses at work and doing their jobs as it made it more authentic and trustworthy. I had noticed the pin-tucks in a couple of the photos and really liked them. Therefore, I went on to create some samples of different ways I could portray these lines/pin-tucks and how I could adapt them.

Today I got to see my shirt on a model for the first time. It was exciting to get an insight into the photo shoot taking place and what goes on behind the scenes.

I took some close up photographs of my shirt in progress because I was really proud of the way the details turned out. The thread on the pin-tucks is in contrast to the fabric to make them stand out more. On the main part of the pocket I used thread that matched the dark blue material but used bright blue on the pocket flaps to make them more evident.

When printing the flowers out on the special paper I squeezed as many on a page as possible so there was minimal waste. I cut out all of the flowers by hand and then placed them on the ready cut pattern pieces in preparation of ironing them on. 

I created the collar and part of the top of the shirt to give the illusion there was a shirt underneath the t-shirt. I felt this would give a better impression that they were in fact separate.