Personal Project

Personal Project : Stain Glass Dress

G18 is our personal project unit of of production arts and stage management course

the brief for this unit is to plan, construct, and present a original project within the areas of the course either set, prop, costume, hair and make up, or any designer roles within these parameters.

The project must be completed in the time allocated and be presented in a showcase of everyones work.

When thinking of ideas for my personal project I knew that I wanted to make a garment that can be affected by light. By this I mean when lights are shown onto the garment an affect is made.

From this I landed upon a stain glass. When light is shown through stain glass the pattern or colors are reflected onto the area around it. This can be shown mostly in old buildings and church’s where stain glass is used beautifully as a architectural feature often to convey a story.

I settled upon a stain glass over skirt that when held out reflects the patterns onto the area around it using lighting.

Make Up Designs

Making the skirt

To make the main body of the skirt, it consisted of a very repetitive process of sewing the ribbon to a plastic square over and over again to make a grid shape.

To make the task more manageable I sectioned off the skirt into colour layers being: the yellow, orange, pink, purple, and blue layers.

Now that i had started and found the length it was just a continuation of the process of sewing squares to ribbons.

I did however adapt a my technique a bit by burning the ends of the ribbon with a lighter. This made a more clean and finished look and also saved me some ribbon.

Making the Body suit

I started by cutting out my top fabric which was a semi stretchy velvet. I cut out all the pieces and trialed sewing two of the panels together when they ended up miss-aligned due to the slippery surface.

This resulted in the realisation that I needed for each panel to hand stitch a backing fabric to it to be able to sew them together.

Once the outer layer was stitched together I duplicated the process for the lining and attached them together around the bottom and sides to be flipped inside out for a clean finish.

I left the top open to allow for boning to be sandwiched between the two layers for a seamless look.

Making the Body suit

As I finished earlier then scheduled I decided to make a additional headband for the photoshoot.

this wasn’t something I had planned to make and Im not completely sure if I will use it I will have to wait till the photoshoot to decide.

I made this by creating small stain glass widows using the same lighting gels that I had been using for the skirt and then surrounded them with flowers and glitter.

Testing Projection

Once I had finished the skirt I wanted to assess how the light looked now the skirt was finished.

I first selected a co-par light form the lighting studio and positioned it on a chair with wheels so I could move the co-par around to find a good spot. I then tested the skirt by moving it in front of the light making different Shapes and shadows.

Finally as it was a sunny day too I took the mannequin outside which created an amazing affect on the pavement.