You, as an individual evaluation

For this project we looked at our lives and then made a cushion that would relate to us. At first I looked at doing my family and my first idea was to do a cushion on where everyone in my family live but as I did more work in my sketch book I started to get different ideas, so my final design is based on important places to me that are in the UK, for example I have the place I was born, places I’ve been on holiday and where important things have happened to my family such as where my brother finished part of his training for the army.

The research I did was mainly primary, I got photos from the places I’ve visited either from Facebook or pictures I had at home, and the secondary research I did was mainly in my sketch book and it was for the artist research, the artists I looked at were louise Gardiner, Rosie James and Dorothy Russell.

 

I developed my research by doing two design pages in my book and looking at which would be more suitable and which I would be able to do in the time I had, I also looked at ones that would really relate to myself and once I had chosen which design I wanted to do I changed little parts of it to make it better.

 

For this project I produced a few different experimental pieces, I first did weaving on the peg loom and this was quite a long process which I decided not to include in my final piece as I thought it was too time consuming and I didn’t really feel it fit in with my design. Another process I did was felting, I did this in a previous project and quite liked it so I decided to include in my final project, I wanted to include a few things on my cushion so I used the felt I made as the markers for the map. One other process I did was mark making, i used Procyon dye and wax on the majority of the samples; although I didn’t use mark making on my cushion I did use the Procyon dyes.

 

To decide what fabrics I would use I looked at all the different fabrics available in college and then I weighed up the pros and cons of each one, we all discussed them and how well they would work with the type of cushion we were making. I wanted my cushion to be a usable one rather than a display piece so I needed my fabric to be durable and easily washable so i decided to use cotton for the map and a medium calico for the cover itself.

 

I don’t think I would have used different fabrics for this, however, I think if I would have had time I may have done a different shade of green for the map as I wasn’t that impressed by it but I think I would have left everything else the same as I followed my design to the best of my abilities.

 

My chosen artists and designers linked to my work as Dorothy Russell was a quilting artist I looked at while I was doing some quilting for a sample in class and Rosie James and Louise Gardiner were artists I looked at for my contextual studies also Louise Gardiner does applique and free machine embroidery. These artists didn’t really influence my work that much, however I did use applique on my cushion.

 

I talked to a few of my peers and my tutor about my design and they gave me some ideas on which would work the best, once I decided the design I added a few things to my design and talked about the changes to friends to see if they thought it would work well.

 

I think my cushion could be easily reproduced as it is a fairly simple design and it didn’t take as much time as I originally thought it would.

 

The processes I used throughout this project are felting, applique, sewing, dyeing, free machine embroidery and quilting, although I looked at all these processes I decided not to use them all on my cushion as I didn’t think I had time to include that many also I didn’t feel that they would fit in to the kind of cushion I wanted.

 

I believe that the majority of this project went well and only a few thinks went a little wrong but the few things that went wrong actually worked out in the end, for example, when I dyed my calico and washed it some of the colour ran and because I was washing it in a small sink I had to scrunch the fabric up slightly, this caused the colour to be slightly darker on theses creases and I couldn’t get rid of them but once I have sewn and completed my cushion I thought that where the darker creases were it looked quite interesting and effective because it broke up the solid colour on the calico which I think worked out well. If I were to change anything I think I would move the markers slightly as they were a little off when I stitched them on, but other than that I think I like how it turned out.

 

I don’t think I used my blog effectively as I forgot to use it for the majority of the project.

 

Overall I am very happy with the final outcome as I think that I worked as hard as I could and to the best of my abilities, I followed my design and tried to include as many processes as I could for my design. Also I think I managed my time well throughout the project apart from a few parts where I spent too much time on parts when that time could have been used elsewhere.