I've been so busy with uni work it's been insane! But I thought I would put up some pictures of what I have been doing.
My final year project is Jane Slayre (the story of Jane Eyre but she is a vampire slayer, so a bit more fun and less depressing!) Taking the novel adapted by Sherri Browning Erwin I decided to design and make costumes with a comic book influence (think Captain America crossed with themes from Unbreakable) and then adding a little more excitement into the costumes to present my embroidery and comedy just for fun.
The course gets us to design for eight characters and then make either one, two or three costumes depending on how complicated they are. I am making for the characters of Jane Slayre, our herroin who grows up in her aunt's house surrounded by vampyres, then goes to school where the horrid master is creating zombies from any of the girls that die (there is a fight scene with zombie green gloop splashing everywhere) She then goes to meet Rochester at her governess posistion and then when she fleas Thornfield (on her wedding day to Rochester she not only finds out that he is already married but that Bertha Rochester is also a werewolf- standard) she gets saved by the dashing St. John Rivers who is also a vampyre slayre. This leads me to St. John Rivers who is my second character that I am making for, tall and attractive Jane and him share costume influences to create connections between them.
Below are a couple of designs showing in particular the transistions between Jane's costume from 'casual' to preparing to fight with her skirt lifted up. After Jane is St. John, this is not actually the costume that I am making for him but I haven't finished his designs completely yet, so they will be coming soon...hopefully.
During the first term sampling and toiling is very important, this is one of my samples for Jane Slayre's bodice, following the idea of superhero stripes within costumes I have used an historical floral pattern, enlarged it and using computerised embroidery reverse appliqued the pattern onto the boidce pattern piece. Matching up the pattern at the side seam was really hard so it is something that I am going to have to make sure is perfect when I do the real thing in a couple of weeks, also keep my fingers crossed that my model doesn't drastically change size!
The idea of this floral design was translated from a sample sleeve that I completed by hand (I soon realised that computerised machine embroidery was the way to go!) Although I really liked this idea, I decided to opt for a plain sleeve and then have a sparkly beaded undersleeve to create a contrast and the idea of armour.
Below is an image of part of St. John's frock coat, as he is my secondary character I have not sampled as much for him as I did for Jane but I also think this is because I knew as soon as I started designing him where I wanted his costume to go and how I wanted it to look. I'v added some photos of some samples that I made for him as well.
