I was sent home from my parents' house last weekend with an ENORMOUS folio (which I'd quite conveniently left in my childhood bedroom for 20 years. Apparently it's no longer required there). Opening it up was like stepping back to 1989. Mountains of design roughs from fashion college, storyboards, life drawings.... random bits of paper that I wonder why I kept......And I'm back in a flat in St Kilda with a sack of Yoken marker pens and an overwhelming project ahead: my final range for the graduate show at RMIT. Watching The Scarlet Pimpernel on television. Reading about the Regency period.
Drawing and drawing and drawing.... working through design ideas.
Coming up with a few ideas I decide to follow through...
Patternmaking, toilling, finding fabrics... (I know I've posted these photos before, but they're in context here too!).
Making hats, fake fob watches. Organising my brother to make twisted walking sticks from apple-tree roots...
Illustrations, storyboards, folios. Mountains of Letraset. Typewriters.
And a week before final assessment realising that I was yet to actually MAKE the garments!
Making hats, fake fob watches. Organising my brother to make twisted walking sticks from apple-tree roots...Illustrations, storyboards, folios. Mountains of Letraset. Typewriters. And a week before final assessment realising that I was yet to actually MAKE the garments! That week.... passing in a blur of tears, coffee, no-doz and a real fear that there was absolutely NO WAY I was going to get it all done. Roping in my sister for a few all-night artwork-mounting sessions. My mother on the day of my assessment -following me around with Lucozade and fruit salad ("You need to EAT something!"). ...Right down to the last 15 minutes before my presentation to a panel of lecturers and industry heads (when I - normally meek and mild but presently caffeine and panic fuelled - snapped at a senior member of RMIT staff that it was too bad that they were ready to see me - my appointment time was in 15 minutes and I would see them then. I had photocopying to do!). 
It's a recurring nightmare I've had ever since - the anxiety dream I have when there's too much to do in too little time. The difference is that now, twenty years on, I know that I'll survive it. I'll get it all done and get the result that I want.
It's a recurring nightmare I've had ever since - the anxiety dream I have when there's too much to do in too little time. The difference is that now, twenty years on, I know that I'll survive it. I'll get it all done and get the result that I want.Oh... and I'll see you in Sydney, folks! (Believe me - I'll get there!).
See more creative spaces over at Kirsty's.
