Overall, I have really enjoyed this project and this brief, especially because I have felt I have been able to explore my creative maker side more as my first year in university was in the maker course. I have been able to find a great balance between my love of textiles and making to create this current project.
The tutors have been very supportive in my approach to this brief and have really helped me develop my skills as a textiles artist and textiles maker. The feedback I have received from the half way point was very positive and has given me a lot of confidence in my textiles making approach. Although there was positive feedback I was also given informative development targets to hit to improve my installation piece further.
With the written feedback from my tutors I have been able to make a plan of action for where I wanted to develop my work further. I was able to create a list of all the things I hoped to achieve between the feedback and the submission date.
As of now I feel I have managed to do more than I expected to do in the time I have been given to develop my work. Even with the current situation with Covid-19 I have managed to recreate all of my afternoon tea set as the other tea set is currently in the university where I am not able to access it.
I am incredible pleased with how I have managed to balance out my time with doing my consultancy work but also creating and developing my FMP at the same time. I am happy that I have been able to introduce my own dyed fabrics. Before hand in, in December the tutors spoke to me about considering designing my own fabrics and having them printed, which is something I wasn’t very interested in doing as I like my work to be eco friendly. Even though I have created my own patterns I have created my own fabric by using eco dyeing which has created lovely patterns with different shades of green. This fabric I believe has been very successful with making these into teacups. I am happy that I have also been able to keep the green as one of the colours for the tea cups to still have that link with the Welsh Flag.
When I am looking back and comparing my other tea set with this one I am able to see a huge difference in my development from then. Even looking back at the start of term one when I first started creating my tea cups, my making and refinement of my teacups has improved with each tea cup I have made over the course of the year. In total I have made around 15 tea cups and each one you can see a development.
The past couple months has been hard for me to stay focused with my projects with the lack of equipment I have been able to access and order due to longer deliveries and some of my orders still not arriving, but I have remained focused and when I am lacking in motivation in this project I have looked at my FMP and the same with that also.
Overall, I am very pleased with how I have developed in myself. I was very confused and unsure where and who I was in my creative journey and believe I am not confident in saying that I am a textiles maker and this is something I do well and hope to continue doing.
Olivia Cope Textiles Blog 