Week Beginning of the 9th

This week I have been focusing on finalising my designs and thinking about the placement of stitching onto them. I printed out my designs on a small scale first to see which ones I liked most which I then paired each front design with a back design. I wanted to make sure each design fit with the other to create a collection that really responded to my concept and research that I have gathered over the last few weeks. I stuck each cushion design into my sketchbook then critically thought about where the stitching would sit on top by drawing onto acetate first using different colours/coding to decide what would be where. After I had figured all that out I printed out my designs to scale using the wide scale format printer. I had some trouble getting to grips with this, I planned on putting four designs onto one sheet then printing them out on A0 scale but the first one I printed out with only two designs stretched out over the whole page. It works well and looks really effective as it makes me think about how they could maybe look as wallpaper designs but as my main focus of this unit was to create cushions it doesn't work well in my favour. However I finally figured it out and printed them out to scale. As I wasn't planning on printing them all onto fabric I mounted them then like in my sketchbook I printed of the front cushion designs and started to stitch/stick the thread and beads onto acetate.
My original plan was to stick them all but after I had done a few it was starting to use too much time and didn't look very neat. I then decided I would just stick on where I would plan the embroidery to go with the odd bit of actual stitching here and there. After i mounted them all onto the boards with the designs they looked messy but due to the cost of everything and how time consuming the whole process was in the first place I figured i didn't have enough time or money to change it. It looks messy and as i plan on handing it in I feel like it is something that will hold me back. After finishing all of them I went about to make the actual finished cushions that I would hand in. I scaled up my designs and used the digital printer to print them. I think if i had better sewing skills that the finished product would translate better as again once they were finished they looked messy however overall I am really pleased with the final product and i think they translate what I had planned. I wish I had incorporated more techniques into the final products by tufting or using puff binder which would bulk out the different textures on them.
I initially planned on getting inducted on the tufting machine for this unit as i thought it would work really well with my designs and overall concept of my brief but unfortunately I was't able to get inducted due to not enough of a demand for a group induction and the woman who would lead it didn't have enough time to induct me by myself. This really set me back a bit as I had planned on tufting onto a few of my designs and i think it will really affect the overall outcome of my work.