Inspiration

Our first assignment was to bring something to class that inspires us.  This was a really hard assignment.  I tried thinking of some dresses that I had seen that I liked.  Nothing.  I tried looking online for dresses.  I tried googling work dresses and Sunday dresses and church dresses – and came up with zip.  I turned to Pinterest and tried to find something to inspire me.  Strike out!  (But I did come up with three new party decorating ideas and a new recipe.)  I even tried one of the web sites listed in the syllabus as a resource, Style.com.  Looking at the fall runway styles, I flagged a few dresses, but nothing really inspired me.  So I decided I had to think like a left-brainer, and try to let go of my right-brain, methodical side. 

My brother-in-law likes to tell about the college English class he took where the professor wanted the students to write essays about their feelings.  Engineers are not known to be good at this.  He looked out of his dorm window and decided to write about the only thing he saw – the stop light changing colors in the rain.  He wrote a lot of really silly things about how the colors made him feel – everything patently untrue and completely the opposite of what he really thought – and the teacher loved it.  A+.  This is the kind of inspiration I needed.

My area of physics is space physics, and I love Hubble SpaceTelescope pictures.  And pictures of Saturn’s rings taken by Cassini – the F ring is my favorite.  So I turned to the Hubble site and browsed the images of nebulae, which are some of the most stunning images you will ever see.  This is the image I chose for my inspiration piece. 

Hubble Observes Infant Stars in Nearby Galaxy
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/nebula/emission/pr2007004a/

The dress I imagined for this was a midnight blue silk with twinkling rhinestones scattered over the skirt, topped with peachy purple ombre silk scarf. Pretty good for a physicist, huh?  In class, we made sketches of the dress inspired by our muse.

Then we had to go outside and find objects in nature to serve as further inspiration – which we then had to incorporate into our design.  Lucky me – I found some frosted plums which were just the color of that nebula.  (The kids and I actually tried to make plum jam from the fruit of that tree a few years ago.  Completely inedible.  Maybe we should have gotten the plums before they fell on the ground.)  And a crepe myrtle blossom, a blue wildflower, and some green leaves. 

Taking a photo with your phone in one hand while holding bits of leaves and blossoms in the other hand is a bit difficult.  Trust me, that is a little blue flower.  Bonus -- there's a dried crepe myrtle blossom in the upper left corner.

And so that I wouldn't be so predictable, I also took a picture of shaggy gray bark and some brown, curled pecan leaves -- my one-handed photography turned that into a video, though.

Returning to class, we incorporated these new inspiration pieces into our previous designs.

Project I is actually a dress made from cotton with no contouring, plus two embellishments (fabric manipulation or embroidery, etc.).  Now I only have to come up with twenty sketches to turn in next week.