Live Brief - Michael Kidner.

The Michael Kidner Project is to create a collection of fabrics for fashion, using Kidner’s work as inspiration. I decided my collection would be for a menswear audience however be accessory based. I want to create a range of snoods featuring lively colours, exaggerating the extreme colours and overall style. 

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Kidner’s work is very bright and colourful; I rarely use bold colours within my work so I decided this project would be good for me to really push myself. After researching his work I found his ‘Column’ collection the most inspiring. 

Michael Kidner

Initially I was drawing using browns, greens and yellows however I found the brown as a base colour too flat and dull, I therefore moved on and changed my prime colour to grey and navy blue. This was easier to work with and I started to enjoy the colour palette.

I wanted my drawings to be structured and to focus on the pattern, because my work normally focuses on the texture. I surprised myself with this project as it was very different to how I normally work. I enjoyed focusing on the intricate shapes and patterns whilst drawing and using bright colours to liven up my work. As I developed my work I found yellow, green, blue and tan the most dominant colours coming through so I decided to develop this colour palette by looking at different yarns to use. I found wools and cottons which matched my colour palette; I wanted to use more cotton as this yarn is stiffer and creates structure which will help in creating a strong pattern.

 

Also I researched knitwear fashion brand Missoni as their AW15 collection had strong patterns throughout their collection and the bright pops of orange really add depth to their garments. For me this use of colour was intriguing, so for my work I decided bright colours would dominate my fabrics. Whilst sampling I had blocked chunks of brighter greens and yellows which breaks up the darker colours.
 

Initially I used the Domestic machines; however as I wanted structure I found the Dubied machines would be more beneficial.  I used techniques such as plaiting, drop stitch and ladders. 

 

The drop stitch added texture, which at first I was unsure about, however as I continued to mix drop stitch and plaiting I found the drop stitch was not too textured but made my fabric more interesting to look at. 

 

When researching Michael Kidner I found many circles in his work so I drew circular patterns and to bring this idea in I used the reversible circles technique. This was very structured so I started playing around with the size of the circles which was very successful in creating strong patterns and it inspired me to add more intricate detail on my samples.

 

These techniques lessened the stiffness and relaxed the structures which I feel was a necessity as the snoods would need some aspect of drape to sit around the neck in a comfortable way.