I love making Mood Boards!

The assignment for my Textiles class was to create a Mood Board that showed our source of inspiration, the spirit of our "collection", the color story, some fabric, trims/buttons, and to include drawings (known as croquis) of our designs.

I already knew my source of inspiration - it was my walk in the woods at Squam. The spring greens of the new leaves, the dove to charcoal grays of boulders, the bright green mosses, and the persimmon-y colored flowers I photographed were my jumping off point.

A trip to the hardware store yielded paint chips in my color scheme and two hours at Mood, the amazing fabric store, was rewarded with a little pile of fabric swatches. I tore photos out of magazines and printed some of my photos from Squam. Black illustration board was my work surface and I used glue stick and ZipDry paper glue as adhesives.

For my fashion illustrations, I found a website that has FREE croquis (line drawings) in a bunch of different styles and poses (http://www.designersnexus.com/) that help my sketches look professional. I printed my selected croquis then placed it under tracing paper and drew my designs over the skeleton of the croquis underneath. After the clothing drawing was done I drew in the head, neck, arms, legs, hair, etc., to finish the drawing. I scanned the tracing paper drawing, printed it, and colored the printed page with Copic markers. I love this method!

It didn't take me long to arrange all the bits into my Mood Board collages. I glued it all down, added the dimensional elements of fabric, buttons and trim, and they were finished. What fun I had!

In class, we each had to do a presentation of our boards and discuss our inspiration, how it was depicted in the fashions, our target customer, etc. We were then critiqued by the instructor and the class. There were eleven of us in the class and it was interesting to see what everyone did and to learn about their thought processes.

So, here you have my mood boards. I am sure I will make more of them in the future. Not necessarily because I want to be a fashion designer (not this week, anyway) but because it was a great exercise and a lot of fun.

As for my garment construction techniques class, we have learned how to "throw" darts and alter the pattern in a myriad of ways. We've gone from draping to drafting patterns. I have always been curious about how to draft a pattern but always thought it involved a lot of complicated math. As it turns out, there is pretty much NO math involved! Woo hoo! My final assignment for that class is to draft a pattern for a bodice and skirt & make them. Guess I'll be busy this afternoon!

I am having a blast learning all this stuff. I can't wait for Parson's fall schedule to come out so I can figure out what I'm taking next!