Not mine, Sharon’s! I explained to her that I didn’t like the placement of the collar tip because it put the snaps too near the bust point, and was planning to move it up and to the right. Sharon looked at it and said, “You know, if you lower it a bit, the purple collar will meet the purple part of the dark panel, which will provide some nice motion in the piece.” So we mocked it up, and she was right!
Here is the original version:
And here is the version with the collar tip relocated about 1/2″ down, and the fabric moved up slightly:
In the bottom version, there are all sorts of exciting purple diagonals – the narrow left collar, the wide right collar, which leads the eye down to the purple section of the dark panel, and thus to the diagonal front panel of the coat. It’s much better than the top version, I think.
Sharon, surprisingly, was pretty much satisfied with the fit of the latest muslin, only changing the armhole and the sleeve. (OK, the sleeve was totally wrong and needed a lot of changing.) Next step is to design the asymmetric back, relocate the collar point, fix the sleeve pattern, and test the color placement. That last will most likely be done by hand painting six pieces of muslin with dye, to match each of the six panels of handwoven fabric, and then placing pattern pieces, cutting, sewing, etc. as I would on the actual fabric. I expect this will probably take at least a few tries to get right, so I will probably paint multiple muslins’ worth whenever I get around to doing it. (Which may well be after chocolate season.)
It turns out that Sharon is busy next weekend, and the weekend after is perilously close to chocolate season, so we’re going to play things by ear: if I get the next muslin (with or without colorplay) done by then, and I’m not too busy making chocolates, I’ll run up the weekend of Nov 5-6. Otherwise, we’ll put things on hold until after Thanksgiving, when I’ll have time to focus on fiber arts again.
Meanwhile, I’ve done about three hours’ worth of shopping for exotic chocolate ingredients, and will start trialing flavors and making fudges next week. I’ve also started weaving the second dark panel. I’m hoping to be able to dye and weave two color samples for the collar, once the second dark panel is done. But chocolates come first – ’tis the season, after all!
