Work In Progress: silk dress

Yes, silk dress.  I almost always have a hard time giving titles (usually cause my instinct is to alliterate or come up with something that makes me snicker - not always the best move for work that's supposed to address serious ideas).  This piece is no expection so for now it'll just be referred to as silk dress.

I started this piece before I really got into the habit of blogging, and before I got into the habit of taking a tonne of in progress pics, so I haven't mentioned it before.  Well, lots of in progress pictures to come (but not this morning! Woke up late, need to get to work, but felt the need to post seeing as how my last posts had 12 days between them and I got called out.

This work essentially is a very fluid silk organza dress, very sheer, very drapey and references some innocent but grown up experiences from when I was in highschool.  I'm totally in love with it now, but it's gone through quite the transformation.

I'll sum this up better when I have the pictures of it uploaded, but basically when I started this I very much had my Fashion Designer brain in gear and had planned all these ruffles on an underskirt and details that had nothing to do with the conceptual aspects, but just would have made a pretty dress.  However, this dress isn't meant to be worn, it's purpose is completely different from the purposes that influence fashion design so I had to stop thinking like a fashion designer.  It's funny too cause I think instinctively I knew I was approaching it wrong.   I started it, got to a point I loved, and then stopped.  For months.  Now sometimes that stopping and not going further on a project is straight up procrastination; sometimes it's fear.  But sometimes, SOMETIMES I think it's instinct - instinct that something needs to be rethought before it's gone too far.  The trick is figuring out when it's fear, procrastination, or instinct, and not using that as an excuse to get no work done.

At any rate, in one of our classes we had to come up with a Value Proposition, like from a business plan, about our art work and ourselves.  We had to sum up exactly what it is we do in a sentence.  For someone as verbose as me, let me tell you that was hard.

I'll put up my value prop soon but essentially it helped me define what matters to me in my work, and see how I was things to go in the future.  This fashion dress that had one conceptual element did not fit in.  But I loved the idea behind it. 

The solutions:  words.  I decided to use words along the hem to get across my point.
The next job: computers... le sigh.  Not my favourite part of making, but I always love the results.  So I spent a few hours in the computer lab playing with a couple lines from an old favourite poem of mine.  Here's a screen shot of what I was doing.  Brownie points for anyone who can name the poem (and can you catch my spelling mistake? Thank goodness someone in the lab did! Thank goodness for people who care enough to tell me when I'm wrong [or just plain careless]).