Princess Silhouette Skirt Development

After making the skirt for Princess Colour I thought making the skirt for Princess Silhouette would be a bit more straight forward. In some ways it was. I knew my panel patterns worked well and kind of the process of creating the sheer panels and the solid ones. But this process was a bit different because it was about creating depth and texture and not at all about mixing together colour.

Gibb, S. and Jones, U. (2009). The Princess Who Had No Kingdom. London: Orchard Books.

Original design

To start creating this skirt I started with the solid bottom panels and then I created the laser cut ones. This way I could put together the bottom two layers on together rather than just one at a time. I really enjoyed experimenting with black on black fabrics, putting in as much contrast and texture as I could.

I think these bottom two layers really came together well. I felt like it was a bit of a risk using the grey sheer fabric but it does add a new dimensionality to the skirt. And since more black layers will be going over top it shouldn't be too noticeable. I then had to start creating the middle layers. I quickly realized that I did a much better job fabric shopping for this costume than for the other. I had more textural fabric with pieces like a black flocked fabric and a subtle hounds-tooth print. And because of this I could create tabs of just the fabric without any decoration and therefore made more tabs more quickly. This was particularly helpful in adding depth and texture; the more tabs the better!

The skirt above came together a lot faster than the colour one and I feel like it is just as successful. One of the challenges in creating the this skirt has been to incorporate the lighter colours that you can see in the design (where the patterns are really shown off). At first I thought that maybe I could use some of the lighter fabric from the other dress but I wasn't sure how to use it in a subtle way. I discovered that I could use the big sheet of fabric that all the laser cut shapes came from mounted on silk organza to create lighter pattern. This worked well because there was more black than cream but still defined shapes and because the organza is sheer it isn't a startling light colour. Having mostly completed the skirt it is interesting to see that it is a slightly different shape than the colour skirt. This must have to do with the fact that has a different understructure. But since the rings are the same size I didn't think it would make as much of a difference. However the open cage which I think is a bit shorter than the hoop, has more of dramatic rounded shape, where as the colour is just a bit more gradual.