A week ago I started creating the dress that is my entry for the Australian Wearable Art Festival.
I want the surface to be very textured so that motifs look raised and floating above the background.
For inspiration I consulted one of my favourite textile art refernce books - The Art of Manipulating Fabric, by Colette Wolff. This book is brilliant but for anyone seeking it out it may be hard to find as the original edition was printed in 1996. As I have been doing textile art for nearing 40 years I have accumulated quite a substantial reference library and note many books in the collection have been out of print for decades.
At this very early stage the dress looks quite soft and limpid but if you refer back to the illustration of my concept garment in the blog post previous to this you can see how the hemline at completion will be a rigid square. That will be quite easily achieved when the surface is finished by making channels along the hem that will have stiff plastic threaded into them. If necessary to achieve a very structured look I could also make vertical channels along the seams to make the dress stand out from the waist down.
The pink background fabric was a nylon curtain. Its there as backing to support all the decorative elements as they get stitched on.