May 19, 2014

101/87 Purple fabric


thecostumersmanifesto

Here is my purple fabric. I woke up one day and realised I have purple curtains. I was gonna move out of the house and would not need these curtains anymore. I was so happy I didn't have to go buy the fabric.


Later I realised the fabric is quite transparent and my Burda model needs 2 different kinds of fabric. I found another fabric from RAW temple flea market just for 2 euro. That man was selling that week so many fabrics and sewing kits. Next week when I visited him again he had totally different kind of stuff and no sewing things. I asked what about the things he didn't sell and he said he donated them to some people. He says he has every week new "old" things . This is good example again of how in life persons and things and situations change all the time. I was very lucky to find my fabrics.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
- Heraclitus

101/86 Paper model!



This was not a easy task. First of all. I didn't realise that when downloading pattern from internet can be super easy then the pattern still has to be made afterwards by A4 papers. In my case my Burda pattern had 60 A4 pages to connect. Usually I have been proud to make my design101 task in 1 hour but this was really a big day project. When you connect the papers you need to be careful that the lines are matching.

Here is my final Burda pattern ready:


While trying to understand the instructions I realised with a help of a friend, Barbara that this Burda pattern gave me actually forms to 3 different dresses. In the end I needed just to use 4 peaces of it for my model: front peace, back peace, sleeve and pocket. My cat could happily start playing with the rest of the paper.

Next thing I needed to do the paper model. Only paper I had was newspaper. It took some time to unite that too to become a "fabric" and then I cut the forms and taped them together.

This process went quite fast and I got no picture after all of my paper model. It was also looking very bad. I kept thinking why I am doing this thing at all. I still learned some important things and I am glad I didn't give up.

1. how to cut the back part seams correctly. They were shown as 2 triangles in the pattern in the back part and first I cutted them as triangle holes. Then I realised you need to juts cut a one line in the middle that you sew straight. This really saved my fabric from a fatal error.
2. that I needed to cut the fabric with 2-3 margins so I would have enough space if I needed it later.


Dressing people design101/85 Burda Pattern







It took some time to find the Burda pattern for my purple dress destined to the final #blaueblumen exhibition at Designtransfer. First I kept searching it from flea markets in Berlin and found last the Burda magazine copy from a second hand shop in Prenzlauerberg. It was a magazine of 1975. Unfortunately that magazine had no pattern sheet attached to it. I tried to read long and hard the German instructions only to understand they didn't mention all of the measurements for the pattern so I could draw it myself. I even tried to copy the tiny drawing still visible in bigger size but it was too complicated to understand how to make it without real measurements.

But luckily there is internet and in there I found Burdastyle and bought one Burda pattern.


This is how the chosen model look: