Practicum at Pastourelle: Day 6 - Flats all Day Flats All Night, and I couldn't be happier!

This will probably be a rather short entry as not much has happened since last week. 

Susan is away inspecting and visiting production factories in China, so Fran was the only one to work with us today. Casey and I have begun drawing out our computerized flats and we showed what we had. She was really pleased with the quality of our flats as well.

I must say, my flats have improved tenfold thanks to a gathers, ruffle, and trim brush set that I downloaded form mypracticalskills.com. There, I was able to buy a file that consisted of all the beautiful and pre-drawn embellishments for my flats to come out FLAWLESS.

I seriously have never drawn better flats in my life, I'm so serious!

Let me let the preview do the talking...

I swear, these look just as good as what I draw by hand and I never thought I would ever think that about my computer flats! I was never able to draw gathers, shirring lines, rusching, or ruffles properly on my own. I never liked how they turned out when I did them in the past. Whenever I made my own brushes, they looked really unprofessional and didn't flow nicely, and they took me a lot of time to make (and only for lack luster results). 

I was devastated initially at the thought of doing all these elaborate flats by computer, and now I'm actually having fun drawing these and I don't want to stop! I've already gotten through 6 of the Marionette Masquerade flats and it's only been 3 days! It may not sound like much but that's a huge improvement. With this brush set I'm able to draw out my styles in record time, about 30 minutes per flat, that without these brushes would have tacked an hour onto that time easily. 

At this rate, I'll have all these flats knocked out before next week...just when I thought this would take me an eternity, an eternity full of tears and frustration, I instead made lemonade from my lemons so to speak!

I like drawing dresses on the computer so much that I will probably never go back to hand flats, and with good purpose, as the children's wear industry is highly CAD based.

The next skill I want to work on is creating custom prints and graphics beautifully and efficiently.

Now I figure that the more difficult part of this project will be rendering 20 figures to coordinate with these! Along with the figures I need to do for Fashion Art. I'll be rendering 32 figures in about 7-8 weeks, yikes!

Thus is why I'm being disciplined and spending a portion of everyday doing something for this project until it's done. EVERY DAY. At least one flat per day until they're done, and then one figure per day until they're done - of course doing as much as I can when I actually can. 

Right now, it's all about balancing the workload.

Anyway, until next week when we meet back in class, I'll have my flats and fabric ideas by then to share.

Practicum at Pastourelle: Day 5 - Setting the Stage + Insight on Production - Avoiding a Nightmare...

Day 5 was in fact a quick day, we left a bit early as things were quite busy. That morning there was going to be a meeting with buyers from Saks, and a lot seemed to be getting in motion to go on.

Fran and Julia first had us sit in on a merchandising run through for a buyer from Costco, a new run that they will be doing soon. We were joined by Cat, in charge of CADs, who would be redesigning the prints and motifs from older silhouettes for the Costco customer once their buyer comes in and gives her input. It was very interesting to witness and be a part of the overall process. It was insightful and I really appreciate being able to see that.

Next, there was a surprise visit, and this is where the story gets a little interesting.

So, a couple came in the design office, a contact that they had been referred to about a prospective production factory right here in the city, literally right around the corner from headquarters. Fran thought it a good idea to let us sit in on the impromptu meeting.

We sat quietly to the side and witnessed the talks. We were joined by VP of Production, Kathleen, whose knowledge and approval was vital in the deliberations. 

First some back story...

Fran had told us in the past that ideally they would love to be able to produce higher end garments under the Pastourelle directly named line in high end boutiques, in which the garments would be made right here in the USA. Right now of course their production is based in China mainly, which is still the only cost effective notion at the moment, but Fran's dream is to bring production right back in our own country (something that I can only wish will also happen again one day, fleeting dream I know...for our economy's sake!)

Anyway, I digress...

So in the meeting, the couple introduced themselves to everyone, and I could tell outright that Kathleen was a little skeptical. They proposed they had a production factory of 4 sewers who could produce garments for children's wear. The woman brought in a sample they had made, and it looked legit. They were nice people, and insisted that Kathleen could stop by their facilities that same afternoon to check it out for herself. Fran and Julia were optimistic about the possible endeavor, but Kathleen wasn't so much.

After the couple had left, Kathleen went on to voice her slight discords. 

In her words to us...

"You can't just trust anybody!"
She joked, but there was a lot of seriousness to this.

There are constant horror stories about worker mistreatment and moral and ethics issues when it comes to garment production factories. Inspections are rigorous and sadly a lot of things still go on unknown, so Kathleen had all the right to be a skeptic. Only 4 sewers? Sounded a bit fishy to me as well.

I wonder when the verdict on this place was after Kathleen's in-person inspection...I should ask about that next week...

To end, we ended the day by going over our design tweaks, fabric choices, and design details with Fran once again, and her input was rather helpful. She suggested to me to inspect fabrics more to make sure I have all my fabrications appropriate for the dress it will be made from. 

I'm overwhelmed with swatches, but I'll manage!

I'm going to rework my color story for Clara's Christmas Dream again.

Lastly, Susan wants to see the makings of tech packs from us next week, so I'll be working on those. I also want to get all my flats done in 3-4 weeks for both collections, ideally in 3, so I'm not working on them at the same time as flats for Portfolio class. Once all those flats and tech packs are completed, then I'll breathe easy. 

Until next time~

Practicum at Pastourelle: Day 4 - Time to get started...

Had another pleasant and productive day at Pastourelle today, it started off slow, not really having perfected a direction, but ended with a lot in place. 

We'd visited on our own on October 4th to get a short word in with Fran about the thumbnails we had drawn initially, and got some simple feedback then, and we are now working from those initial suggestions.

Our task for today was to narrow down our designs from the thumbnails we had drawn, pick size ranges for said designs, and finally to finalize our fabrics. 

For me, it started out with a mess off fabrics, and my thumbnails cut apart (and flying everywhere because there was some phantom breeze of sabotage blowing the entire time, frustrating!) so I was able to switch certain styles between collections. 

Fran suggested that I switch some of my more innovative designs out of Marmelatta and into Pippa, and my more market level designs from Pippa to Marmelatta, so that's exactly what I did. My designs for Pippa are a little more embellished, have much more refined fabrics, and have more minute details compared to my Marmelatta designs, that though embellished, have a more marketable customer in mind. 

So today I finalized exactly what dresses I would be doing and got a great handle on what fabrics and colors everything will be. The organization is still a mess and now that I've edited I feel as though I still have some fabrics missing, but I will be remedying that soon. I'd say I'm about 90% there in terms of having everything ready to go together. I think I'll just organize it a little better for myself this weekend.

Fran suggested I take the red out of the "Clara's Christmas Dream" collection for Marmelatta, and though a true Christmas red is ideal for a Holiday collection, she felt that I could omit it because I was having so much trouble trying to make it work with the icy blues and pinks in my collection, which I completely agreed with. So there is no more red in it, and it's for the best. 

So for next week I will definitely want to have all my fabrics set and ready, laid out and organized perfectly, their colors finalized, designs tweaked and altered where needed (which is only maybe say 2 dresses). It's 20 dresses total between the two collections which worked out just fine. I think I will be able to manage it. 

I will be adding custom prints to my collections, one in each. I have the harlequin diamond design for Marionette Masquerade, and I was thinking of incorporating a ballet dancer border print to a dress, but I think I have to re-evaluate for sure where that will go. 

Once I have everything ready and set to go in terms of design, color, and fabric choices, I will move on to illustrating my technical flats on computer, as that's the most difficult and time consuming task for me. After that I will move on to my two tech packs, and finally the actual rendered illustrations. Maybe I will do my pencil sketches beforehand, but at this point the flats are the most important to me as I really want to better my technical skills. 

9 weeks to go...the midway point has come and I must stay afloat!

Until next week...