Having thought about collaborating with a fashion designer towards the end of the practice unit, I felt this was a good time to combine my own skills with the skills of others to produce a garment that represents my context for the degree show. I feel lucky to have a family friend who is a tailor, showing that making contacts is very important, and the collaboration should be off a high standard and quality.
Trying to have a large piece of my fabric woven would cost too much money and time due to the detailed pattern and complicated colour and threading, therefore I have decided to digitally print my fabric in order to represent a woven cloth for a smaller price. Although it is quite late on in the year to experiment with a new media, I think it will portray my intended outcome and context well, as it is to be printed on a thick cotton.
In order to put my fabric in to repeat I had to scan in different sections and piece it together on Photoshop, although this proved difficult as the stripes on the fabric itself were not quite straight, meaning the repeat didn't fit together. This is the downfall of hand weaving over digital, as more mistakes can be made. In this case, the beating of the yarn was not equal across the fabric, which I think is something I need to take more care of with my next samples.
Having looked at the samples from Dashing Tweeds, I have a better idea of the size of checks that are in the current menswear market. I thought there may have been a set size, but from measuring a selection of samples, it showed that the smaller the pattern the smaller the check. I decided on an 8cm x 8cm sized check as this would show more pattern when tailored and makes the printed fabric different to the original woven sample.
I sampled my pattern 6 times, changing the hue, saturation, levels, brightness and contrast on each to see how they would appear when digitally printed as the original scan was quite dark. The test pieces helped me to decide on colour and although I thought the colours on the original scanned image would come out very dark, it happened to make the brighter colours appear brighter with the dark colours complimenting this.