Spring Plans

Guess who will be attending the London College of Fashion this coming spring semester??

-ME!

I got my notice last Wednesday and I have paid my deposit so I am officially attending LCF!

I can't wait until January rolls around I get to fly over there and settle n for an amazing semester abroad.

Stay tuned for more information regarding class descriptions and more.

My LCF Application

I officially applied to London College of Fashion! After a lot of confusion, a late application to Purdue, and lots of rushed scheduling of meetings, I applied! 

The application is a lot like other applications. It asks for your information, college, GPA (both accumulative and major), transcripts, a picture for your ID, an essay, and then 2 letters of recommendation. There's a few more pieces of information it asks for but that's just medical and housing type stuff. But the part I wanted to share is the pictures of my 5 pieces of work I sent with my application. I had to pick 5 pictures that show a variety of my work and it took me a while to figure out what pictures would show off my skills and a variety of work. 

So here they are:

1. Starting with the picture above on the left- it's of my models Eric and Gabby from this past spring's fashion show. I chose a picture of the back because it gave me the best view of Gabby's dress and how his vest matches her dress. Also, I just think they look really great like this!

2. My shoe project from over the summer! (above on the right) I think it's a good variation of work because who makes shoes out of cardboard and paper that you can walk in?

3. On the left is my collared top I made for class last semester (spring 2014). It has a black lace bow with a tortoise shell button.

4. On the left is a pastel piece I did in AD114 last fall of a sculpture I made.

5. Lastly I uploaded a picture of 2 pages from my portfolio. It's a project from last year where we created a line of dresses using optical illusions as inspiration.

Pop of Pink!

So a few weeks ago I decided to try and dye my hair pink. I didn't want it to be permanent so I tried finding a brand that would work. After asking my very hair coloring savvy friend I settled on Garnier's Color Styler wash out pink hair dye. 
My friend Hale then helped dye it for me one evening. I wanted to try that tie-dye effect and not completely dye all of my hair. I thought it would be a lot of fun to try something different  than the usual dip dye or ombre effect. Right after Hale put the coloring in my hair looked bright pink and I was a little overwhelmed. I had really hoped for a lighter shade, but the box did advertise a bright bright. I woke up the next morning and after showering it looked a lot better. I was happy that the color wasn't as intense anymore and I loved how Hale had made it looked when she dyed it. 
The only down side to the experience was that instead of lasting the 3-4 washes/days it stayed in for about 2 weeks or so. It wasn't great after the first week, it made my hair look oily and gross for a bit. I borrowed Hale's natural shampoo and washed my hair multiple times one night and it helped a lot. 
I might try a different color another time, maybe the blue. I think as long as I'm prepared to wash my hair with the natural shampoo (or dish soap) after it's been in too long I'll do it again.

Paper Shoes

I just realized I never wrote a post about the paper shoes I made for my summer art AD106 class. They didn't turn out how I had originally planned but I liked them a lot and I got a 100% on the project.

The project requirements were that the pair of shoes (yes 2 shoes) had to be created solely from paper and cardboard, no fabric materials at all. They needed to have a minimum of a 2 inch heel/lift/platform and you needed to be able to walk in them for 60ft+. While 60ft was the minimum you needed 80ft to get full credit and any foot after 80ft was extra credit, but you could only get a 100% on the project no matter how many feet you walked. 

Another requirement was that the shoes designed needed to have a minimum of 3 colors. Originally I was very certain I wanted my shoes to be red, black, and white. Just like most of my designs usually are those three colors. However, when I went to the store the prices and selection provided weren't great at all and I ended up choosing a black sparkly glitter paper and then blue and silver hologram type paper. 


I made the first heel as sort of my prototype for what I wanted the structure to look like and went from there. One idea I decided on was making the heels have a strap like a pair of sandals. I was going to have some ankle strap be decided against it because I thought it wouldn't help me with the walking. Then I played around with the idea of spikes or flower petal like cardboard pieces around the ankle. However, with the paper choices I made those didn't look too great. Finally I liked the idea of having little triangles connecting the platform to the heel. I thought it would help me with stability. 

 The picture to the right is my final design. It's not the best craftsmanship but I was the only person to do high heels this way (not just a platform lift the whole foot length/size) and I was the only person to really take a risk creation wise. The colors looked pretty stellar too actually. I called them my galaxy heels. For the walking test I got maybe 10ft and the heels were breaking. I essentially slid my way all the way down to maximum extra credit on floating heels because my platforms were so strong. Essentially the triangles needed to be way more stable and I probably shouldn't have walked around in them so much immediately after finishing make them because I might have worn them down a little too much. Overall it was a great project and I'm really happy I went with my idea to do high heels even though it was difficult. I love projects like this and I think it just backed up my idea that I'd love to make shoes at some point in my career. Plus, it was just a lot of fun to work on over the summer!

Crayon Art

This year I chose to live in a dorm since I will be (hopefully) studying abroad for the spring semester. One of the perks of living in a dorm is free craft nights and other fun activities, they usually involve snacks or pizza, with your floor. Well my floor did a craft night this past Sunday night where we did crayon art. It was really neat! Everyone started out with a blank canvas and then got to pick out what crayons they wanted. I chose basically all of the pinks and a few purples and maybe 2 blues.

After you pick your crayons and put them on the canvas how you want, you hot glue them to the canvas. You could also tape them if you wanted to remove them but I just chose the hot glue option. Next you use a hairdryer to melt the crayons. There are a few methods to melt the crayons but I just pointed the hair dryer and moved my canvas around so that the colors would mix more. Finally, when I was satisfied with what it looked like I cut the parts of the crayons that were sticking out too much. So now it is just a colorful canvas, which I think looks pretty cool.

The whole process maybe took 20-30 minutes. It was fun though, socializing, eating some snacks, and making crayon art. I would definitely recommend this for other artsy people, or for even unartsy people!

My Final Piece

Fall Semester

It's been a while since I've written, about a month or so, and I'm ready to get back into and make some time for more articles. 

I've moved into a dorm on campus, a single room that is super tiny. It's nice and cozy though. I didn't bring a lot of my sewing stuff since it takes up a lot of space. 

I'm taking 19 credit hours. My classes include CAD, Showcase, being a Peer Mentor again for CSR100, French 302, Intro to French Literature, an Advertising class, a computer class, and then my design internship credit. 

I'm no longer working at Charming Charlie or writing for ColleeFashionista (that was just a summer long internship). I'm back to working at Levy for football games and catering events. I am, however, interning for the Costume Shop here at Purdue. It's great! It's an unpaid design internship but it's in PAO and I get 10+ hours a week. I'm doing 1 credit worth, so 140 hours, this semester and then the other credit next fall. I'll do a post on my interview process soon.

I'm in the process of finishing my application for London College of Fashion. I'm waiting on my letters of recommendation from my 2 professors and then I'll be submitting it! I'll write more about my application when I have it all put together and finalized. 

I'll be posting about the project I have to do this semester for Showcase involving sustainability in fashion.

As of now I'm just trying to get awesome grades, get quality sleep, and not get whatever virus is going around on campus. Stay tuned for more!