Fabric manipulation techniques

This fabric manipulation technique involved me using the primary image I had taken of the sea and emulating the colours and shapes, into the fabric. To create this effect, I layered different types of fabric on top of one another to create the texture of the beach. I have thought about where to layer each fabric, as each colour represents something different on the image. Here, I have placed the darker colours near the edge, to represent the colour of the deep sea waters, I then placed a lighter blue coloured silk chiffon fabric on top of the dark blue velvet fabric to see the contrast of both. Next, I focused on the white frothy part of the water, near the very edge of the sea. This was shown through sewing on a white fine linen fabric, frayed at the edges to give it an uneven look, much like the edge of the sea. To sew these pieces of fabric together, I have used uneven, random stitches in white thread, to represent the movement of the uneasy sea.

These fabric techniques allowed me to see the effects fraying has on different types of fabrics. Here I have used different types of linen fabrics to see the outcome of fraying them. I am unsure as to leave the edges of some of my garments raw, which means that they will more than likely fray, so I wanted to take advantage of this and see what different techniques of fraying I could come up with. The first technique on the left simply involved me fraying the sides, by pulling thread by thread however still leaving a considerable amount of fabric left in the middle. The next sample was one of my favourites as I have never seen something like this before. I frayed both sides, the same as the sample previously, however this time I cut into the fraying edges, unevenly to give a different, and more rugged look. The third sample is the same as the first, however this time I frayed it more, leaving less fabric in the middle. The final one involved me snipping into the edges of the fabric unevenly, so that when I frayed the edges, they'd all be different shapes and sizes, this also gave a quite rugged look and created some interesting shapes. From this I can see that there are a number of possibilities when having raw edges on garments, although the outcome has been interesting, I am still unsure as to whether I should have raw edges on my garments or not.

As I will be making a woven top for one of my outfits, I want to incorporate woven elements into my other garments, such as around the waist of a playsuit, or on the cuffs of sleeves. Therefore, I have drawn different examples of woven techniques, I think the one I would be most likely to go with is the bottom one, the blue one as this is more simple to create with fabrics, the others include something stiff such as pieces of wood, that the fabric is then wrapped around. Like I mentioned before, I would feature the woven detail on the waist band or the cuffs or the hem of a garment, as these small details can what make a collection come together.