First week back after the Christmas break. I was very grateful for the time off to rest and recharge. It was through this that I realised how hard work doing these internships can be and how much they take out of you. In my circumstances, I am also having to work a considerable amount outside of my studies so that I can support myself with the decreased loan that we get on this dps year, meaning some weeks when I included the 24 hours a week I would be working at story, I could be pulling 65 hours and 6/7 days working almost every week without some time off to rest. But I suppose this was a wake-up call that I would have to be doing something similar to this when I finish university if I want to do more internships and gain more experience before I go into industry. Textiles is a hard industry to get into and I feel you need to prove yourself and have good contacts if you want to achieve your goals within the industry. From this I have learnt that I’m not afraid of that and I’m not afraid of having to do hard work in order to reach my goals.
Back to story! I was very excited that I was headed back here after the Christmas break and not moving on to somewhere else. It was full steam ahead when I got back as well with some new designs being put together that me and Julinka had been previously discussing. Julinka had found a gorgeous vintage piece just before we left for the break that had some really gorgeous but unusual techniques within it. Sometimes Story will sell on these beautiful embellished pieces as vintage designs to their clients, sometimes they will adapt them or embellish them and then sell them on. However, with this piece Julinka thought that it was a little too dated to sell as vintage, which I agreed with, the colours weren’t quite right and there was strands of glitter knitted within it which we both thought was a little too much. So instead we decided to use the piece as inspiration and technique reference for a new deign.
We discussed various options for this design and we came to the conclusion that we wanted it to be very abstract like the vintage garment, but we wanted it to be made from organza and come across quite bridal and elegant.
I was left to design the piece with these rough instructions. I went down the route of using the ribbon technique that was on the vintage and creating some abstract continuous line butterflies. I also drew some abstract squiggles that would be on the backing of the fabric so would come across as more of a textural element rather than a patterned one. By this point I was starting to write up the designs by myself without too much guidance. I would then run these by Julinka to be given the all clear that she was happy to send this design forward to the artilliers. This is a skill i’m very grateful for and I ended up learning a lot about the vocabulary and technical words that you should use to describe your goals within a design.
