Today I played with cad embroidery onto my fashion samples that have been sublimated with collaged papers (also using cut out resists). I layered some pieces of laser cut fabrics and knit on top of the printed fabrics and secured with vilene. I created some CAD designs using scans and drawings on photoshop but also found it useful to hand draw the design straight onto the Generations software. I found that this created cleaner lines and also shortened the clean up time of the design.

I designed  fairly simply shapes, just keeping the outline so that the the shape wasn't filled as I didn't want block colour or block stitch on my print as I thought this would take away the simplicity.

 I still feel that the CAD was unsuccessful in some ways, this may have been down to the choice of stick length and density but also the colour choice and positioning of the stitching. If I could do it again, I would use neutral colour thread and loosen the stitches by changing the density even more as well as working on less white fabrics (changing the ratio of colours).

layering the laser cut fabrics, that were sublimated

before the fabrics were stitched into

From yesterdays print session and tutorial with Nick, I realised I should change my colour palette by adding in some more neutral shades, exploring tone of colour more and using neutral browns/nudes/pinks as backgrounds. This means I must either create some more printed papers in the print room to further develop my colour palette. I need to do this by referring to further colours found on the street. I want to find some more grey tonal shades to suggest sophistication.

I also want to further refine the colours in my fashion projects, well aware that the design process should be starting very soon. I need to ensure that I include more neutrals in this project too. So that the colours that are present are pops of colour.