Christopher Kane A/W11 used lace throughout the collection, i liked the fact that some were made purely form lace and others had inserts, which inspired me for my trousers.

For my second pair of trousers we had lace fabric, and when i thought about lace trousers i didn't think that they would work very well so i decided to incorporate the lace with another fabric so they would be more wearable. I decided to make some quite formal trouser with lace panels up the inside and outside of the leg to give them an edge.
The trouser were quite small when i tried them on, so i think it was something to do with editing the pattern because i wanted them to be a skinny fit, i made the pattern smaller which i think made them to small.
I think they worked better than some of me previous garments because i have learnt how to properly put a zip in and also gained experience about waistbands. I used some of the left over interfacing from my skirt 2 to create a waistband which would be stiff and much more like a waistband. I feel that it worked well using that.

Waistband, only problem i didn't cut enough fabric to cover the interfacing but it made the band a lot easier to work with because it was stiffer.

The neckline where it gathered and even though i snipped at it, it still didn't loosen so i think the tension was wrong on my machine and caused it to do this.

Invisible zip

The outside stitching because the yoke was too thin to fit all the gather into the lining so that it wouldn't be seen.

I had trouble with working out how to make the whole of the yoke all lined so that you couldn't see any of the raw edges once i'd done everything lined it left me with the top which i could sew up without not being able to turn it the right way again

Fendi A/W2006

Luella s/s 2003

Micheal Kors s/s 2003

Designers that have used yokes in parts of there designs.

For the second dress we were given chiffon, which is known to be a difficult fabric to work with so i didn't want to do anything too complicated. I like the way chiffon looks when it has been gathered so i decided to just cut the chiffon into 2 big rectangular pieces to gather them and make a yoke for it to be attached to. Because chiffon would be very difficult to use to make a yoke, i decided to get an easier fabric to work with, i used a cotton and bought lining to go underneath, i found it difficult to line the fabric and especially on the neckline where it kept gathering, i made snips in it to loosen it but i think it was the tension on the machine that made it have a slight gather in the end.

I also didn't know how to completely make the raw edges of the yoke go into all the lining so that everything would be neat, also when attaching the chiffon bottom half, because the yoke was small it meant i couldn't put it inside of the lining and the cotton, so you could see the stitching on the outside which wasn't what i wanted.

After my first attempt of putting an invisible zip in my first skirt i attempted it again using the right foot on the machine and it worked out really well and was actually invisible. However once i put the skirt on the model and zipped it up, the zip broke i think it was because the skirt was small fitted so it was difficult to get the zip up and we tugged on it to hard.

Overall i think my second skirt worked out a lot better than the first because i understood the places i had gone wrong the first time.

http://www.sewbox.co.uk/blog/235/how-to-sew/a-beginners-guide-to-interfacing/

I wanted to learn more about interfacing and how it can be used and what fabrics its best for etc and found this blog which was useful on giving information about it.

For our second skirt we had to use interfacing, which was a difficult fabric to work with because you couldn't press it however i tried to use it to my advantage by making a peplum skirt and because interfacing stiffens fabric it meant the peplum worked well. The only problem i had with the peplum was that the fabric stared to fray and i thought with using interfacing it wouldn't.

David Koma uses Peplums in a lot of his work, i think from looking at his work inspired me to make a peplum to create a peplum i just made a semi circle on pattern paper and then cut round the fabric and cut a smaller whole in the centre so it would form a ruffle

The peplum i created, it started to fray on the edges which i thought wouldn't happen due to the interfacing but for some reason it did.

I used the basic skirt block because the first skirt i made i didn't use a pattern, but i took the pattern in because i wanted it to be more fitted and towards the bottom of the pattern instead of being an a- line skirt, i wanted it to be a pencil skirt, i put two darts on the front and 4 on the back to create the fitted effect.