Introduction to Embellishing

Today was the first day of my MA in Design for Fashion & Textiles at Bath Spa University and to start it off we had a day of being inducted on the Embellishing machine. This was the my first embellishing experience so I was very interested to see what it was all about. I took influence from the tacky 90's seat patterns you see on buses and coaches.

As sickly as I think they are I love looking at the patterns on seats every time I get on a bus!

So today I decided to try create my own style of coach seat fabric using the embellishing machine and a range of colourful fabrics from wools and felts to chiffons and mesh.

 First I thought I would go for the more garish design, layering lots of colours and shapes on to a dull grey background. I put some mesh over the top of it all the other layers of fabric which gave a really distressed, broken effect which I will definitely take in to account when experimenting with embellishment in the future.

I went for more of a subtle design for my second sample, this time layering the coloured stripds of mixed fabric between two lengths of grey woolen fabric and putting it through the embellishing machine very slowly which gave the fabric a cord like effect. This brought the colour through the grey in strips in accordance to the cord which gave a really nice effect.