Drapes of Wrath

I encountered my toughest challenge thus far, the creative dolman. On Monday, the professor encouraged us to simply play with the fabric to get a feel for what it wanted to do. I was originally working with a lightweight crepe georgette and I discovered that soft draping is much harder than it looks. I felt as though I needed at least three hands to be able to do the job right and I started to get really nervous that maybe I was a null at soft draping. Wednesday night I decided to take some extra time to play with a heavier fabric in order to get some more practice before Friday's class. The extra play time and sturdier fabric really helped and Friday I created a dolman that I liked. The professor said I was skipping forward to a future lesson by doing an underarm drape but he didn't want to discourage my creativity so he encouraged me to move forward. This is one piece of fabric draped under the arm to create a dolman sleeve on one side and I later draped another piece of fabric to match at the center back and other side seam. All pins at this point, I later tacked and marked it with thread.

For our assignments, we are only required to drape one half of the garment if its a symmetrical design. I was tired of throwing away fabric and having nothing to show for all of my hard work, so I decided to drape the whole garment. That decision almost led to a breakdown when I took all of this drapey fabric off the form and it ended up looking like a confusing jumble of nothingness on the table. After a long night in the work room, I pretty much had it sorted out and today I finished it "classroom style" for the grading. I still have some tweaking to do to it for it to be wearable but overall I am really proud of myself for what I created.