Sixths months down the line and we were pretty serious, and Christmas was on it's way. I knew from Becky, our mutual friend, that he was doing something quite impressive, but I had very little money, so I tried to think of something original to do. I ended up getting him a calendar with a different photo of us for each week (yes there were enough photos of us, mainly thanks to Becky). And I decided that every month, from the 20th to the 29th, I would surprise him with a gift. With each gift was a note with "on the first day of Christmas" for Juanuary and so on, I got lots of different gifts from handmade chocolates to a bag, belts to books, and so many others that I can't remember now.
Anyway it worked out that the "twelfth day of Christmas" would fall on Christmas day one year later and I had decided quite a while before that I wanted to get Chris a guitar. We'd been shopping together before in a guitar shop so I knew he wanted a maple fretboard and that he thought Fenders were the best for their price so I bought him a black 2009 strat.
I had chosen my textiles project in Spetember to be "expressions" with the intent to explore "musical expressions" and use the guitar as inspiration for one of my pieces. To point my sketchbook in the right direction I did this wadded batik piece with musical notes:
The way that the course is designed means that you need to have some artist influence and I found Lena Karpinsky, who did amazingly beautiful canvas paintings on musical themes.
I used her as my inspiration for one of my pieces, which was based on Chris's guitar, it is painted silk with stitching:
However, I still felt like I wanted to do more with this style and wanted to recreate the above piece in a dress form. I did this as my final piece. The whole thing is made of silk, with a separate 7-layer netting tutu. The bodice consists of four silk panels, with three netting panels, and three netting ties across the back. Down the front netting panel there are six "strings" made from wire and sequins to represent inlays. There is a ruched silk section showing the main body of the guitar.
Modelled by me, photography by my sister Nina. I am a touch photoshopped, I quite like red hair on me...Around the side of the bodice is the headstock, sewn on to give it definition, and beaded to create the tuners.
I didn't quite get the same colours on this piece as I did on my flat version, but I still like it.Oh and it turned out his impressive present for me included a Tiffany necklace!
Which I have worn nearly every day since then :)(sorry for the poor photo, we were having a balloon thrown at us while trying to get a photo, but it's the best to see the necklace)
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