HORN-MART IS OPEN

If you ever saw something on this blog, and thought "Gee, I want that!" now's your chance to own a little piece! Send all interested emails to bleachrainbow@hotmail.com

Also, please keep in mind, most of these are art-pieces--they're totally wearable, but may not be perfectly made!



Ever needed a pair of warm, fashionable Bright Red Cha-Cha Leggings?
Lovely jersey knit leggings with ruffled panels. Securely serged together with finished elastic waistband and cuffs. Ruffles are raw edged. If you really, really want the shirt for some reason, I'll throw it in.
Waist: stretchy, about a medium legging size--probably 28-32 waist
Hips: roomy, probably 34-38
Fabu Price: $40.00




For those occasions when you need to keep an eye on your surroundings, this Fringed Eye Skirt is perfect.
Full, inverted pleat skirt with upholstery fringe eye detail, quilted velvet hem and button placket. Great shape, very solid, the button holes on the back are not the most beautiful things in the world though.
Waist: 28-30 inches
Hips: Free
Length: 27 inches (just below knee on 5'4" model)
SOLD!!!



I don't know what you'd make with this, but it's totally necessary to have some Electric Animal Yardage lying around.
Hand screenprinted cotton broad cloth in teal and yellow on white, with cute little eels, lightning bugs, jellyfish and anglers! A 42" by 60" piece with a 23" square cut out. Still lots of fabric!
SOLD!!!





Absolutely necessary for your 'Under the Sea' themed school dance is this Jellyfish Bubble Skirt
Cotton velvet and lots of painstaking cotton hand embroidery. Long strands of embroidery floss hang down from it--you can cut these off or knot them or leave them, whatever. They do move so nicely though! Only downside is a rather ugly lining out of panic and necessity.
Waist: 28"-32"
Hips: Rather snug, but the model had around 36" hips
Length: 29"
The "I spent over 40 hours on this, please pay me less than minimum wage price of: $200"





For both fencing and space travel, look stylish in this Quilted Horn Suit
Heavy cotton/poly sweatshirt material and poly filling make it warm and cozy. Corded quilting makes it rather substantial. The sides are a stretch knit with more piping/cording. The undershirt with funny little hood is included, the pants in the first picture are not, they were badly designed and split several seams the night I wore them.
As a note, the last picture shows some stains that are visible on the piece. It was made to answer an assignment about 'relics' and so was let to get dirty naturally as I worked on it. So it's got some smudges and stains on it. I suppose you could probably wash it, frankly, I wouldn't...they're sort of there for a reason, but hey, you buy it, you do what you want!
Get this stylin' piece of retro futurism for: $200

Every Coat has a Red LIning

Updating was a bit delayed this week because I was under the mistaken impression that I had a Projects critique today--not only is it not today, it's not for another two weeks. So that's a sigh of relief, but I sure wish I hadn't stayed up until 4 two days in a row.

The bright side: The lining for Leoh's vest/jacket is all pieced and basted into the jacket.

Attaching the armholes, anchoring the lining in.

Cotton batting in between the lining and the outer layer.

Basted into the coat--now I have to go through and quilt the whole thing--just a stitch-in-the-ditch, brought through to the other side to make a subtle, black-on-black effect.


Chest I'm refinishing for Advanced--more on this as I get further with it. Right now I'm just trying to get a nasty finish off. It was originally a four-track/record player, but I ripped all the electronics out.


Starting to sew the pieces together for the arm guards. You can see the little shoulder pieces formed up already.

Double layers of wool and suede. The suede is extremely thick, I need to use an awl to punch holes before I sew--it makes my hands hurt.

After I attached the wool to the front, I drew diagonal diamonds on the inside, then 'quilted' it through the wool and leather--this will form cutaways later.

Nasty flash, but you can start to see the 'quilting'

Senior Presentation Pt.2

I'm sorry this took me a few days to start again, I quite abruptly was laid off the other day, so I've been on damage control duty. Some of my older work may come up for sale soon. So if you want some red ruffled tights or three-legged jeans, let me know.


So, as I left off, I was thinking about context to go along with the garments I was constructing. In this case, it was as simple as the automatic gesture of a putting a bag over the seat of a chair. The bag itself is also the start of the body of work I've been on since that point. I started with a narrative I'd been playing around with as a comic idea--of a group of people, a city, that had once been a large trading city for textiles and craftsman. What happens when those people are occupied, oppressed? When they have no new fabric for themselves, and are forbidden to use their own dyes in their garments? Would they craft things just as well, out of those bits and pieces? Would they hide their favorite colors away, in linings, in pockets, on undergarments?


This was the Kowloon Walled City. Just outside a major chinese city, it was a two-block square area that was considered 'hands-off' by the government. The people there, and those that joined them, transformed the apartment buildings to suit their own needs, subdividing and connecting, until the entire thing had grown into this organic city.


People will always alter their surroundings to fit their own needs.

An ancient fort across the river, filled with debris from their occupiers, becomes a safe haven, a sanctuary, and a new city, rebuilt for new inhabitants.



With the garments themselves, I began drawing inspiration from work-wear and uniforms-both in materiality and in form. They are garments made for specific purposes, and each part of them is generally important to the function of the garment or the attributes of the person wearing them. The materials are also important--stong, familiar materials like heavy wools, flannels, denim, leather. These materials imply both a strength, and a sort of integrity, which I think combines to make even the stranger garments believable as actual, every day wear.


Pants for Teoh the Thief. The first full garment I made in this body of work. Taught me the valuable lesson that I would only be able to make one garment at a time for assignments. Started working with military uniforms and felted knits, material's I'm still exploring. Also the first piece made for a specific person.

Every piece starts as sketches. These are not the sketches that came before the garment, I couldn't seem to dig any of those up, but rest assured, the pants were quite different. The drawings I start with are a guide more than a design. Since I'm working with found materials, these materials often dictate the design and working process, and change the end result. And then it's back to drawing what it is I actually made. It's interesting to see the chain of drawings informing garments that in turn inform new drawings.


Vest for Lirienne. These next few pieces are all for the same character. (Since I only show a piece at a time in critique, seeing them all together in a row was a bit of a surprise to my classmates, though. This piece I think was the first that hit the level of workmanship that I really needed.


The interior. Like the bag, the color is hidden from view. In a way, linings, and things to the inside of garments are more important. Something on the outside may just be decorative, but there's no real reason for decoration where no one sees it.


Leggings for Lirienne. I'm very happy with the garment, the context, not as much. It brought up loneliness and nostalgia, and all sorts of things I didn't intend. I wanted to completely re-do the chair, but did not have time. I'm still working on that now.


Sketch for Lirienne's shoes installation. Starting to sketch out the context is helping focus what I want to present.


Shoes for Lirienne. I think it's one of the best meetings of garment/context I've managed so far. The door looks less destroyed and more reconfigured, though I'm not sure that came across completely.


Some sketches drawn in various stages of making the garments. Obviously several pieces have not yet been made.


A series of sketches for Leoh's armguards. The drawings get more and more specific as they go on, ending with the one done in red and black.


And seeing the translation from paper to 3-d model. Which is where I am right now, just about.

Senior Presentation Pt.1

Hi, my name is E.Rega, I'm a Senior Fibers major here at The University of the Arts, and I'm going to start this presentation off with one of the most miserable pictures ever taken of me.

If you're wondering why I look so forlorn, those horns weigh a ton.

This was the first 'fibers' piece I did at Uarts, in the Freshman Fibers class with Warren Seelig. I've been working processes since I was very young, but this is the first time I was exposed to it in a college setting, and with the idea that I could actually study it and pursue a career in it. The shape-particularly the horns, and the texture are related to what I'm doing even now.


I'm not a fashion designer. I'll probably never be a fashion designer. But there's a lot going on in fashion right now, and I'd be lying to say I wasn't drawing a lot of inspiration from it. Textures, techniques, as well as concept and context are all interesting to look at from a different perspective.


These two pieces, from my Sophmore and Junior years of Experimental Costume,are examples of this exploration of texture and material, with references to fashion as well as constructed surface.

As far as guilty pleasure sources of inspirations, well:

There's something profoundly strange about the idea of Cosplay While I'm not an anime fan (Akira and Miyazaki excluded) there's something sort of amazing about a group of people totally dedicated to creating garments that were never meant to exist in real life, and probably aren't logistically possible. That transition from illustration to garment is something I'm interested in in my own work.

The next couple of pieces really grew out of that interest in funny, unreal, cartoonish garments.


This was my piece for the Philadelphia Flower Show in Sophomore year. We were instructed to simply make an 'Over-the-Top' garment for a floral designer to respond to. My poor designer gets this piece with absolutely no natural colors to it. She had to use tennis balls to plant her flowers in. I think it was at least a good exercise in that I considered the rest of the garment. It also has, I think, a sort of cartoonish look to it--something that could be doodle but which should probably never be made into a real garment.


This piece I'm not terribly happy with the end result. It's a little too 'crafty' for me--the embroidery thread, well, it's still quite clearly embroidery thread. But I was starting to learn the full potential of surface embellishment. And the pain thereof. And getting used to the fact that I'd be embroidering up until the night before, and all the construction gets done in the early AM.


More of a video game influence here. I was thinking about Katamari Damacy. There was something great about the contrast here between the silliness of the design, and the serious endurance it took to move in it.


I then started going back to my roots--illustration. I originally came to UArts because it has a very good illustration department, and I wanted to do comic books for the rest of my life. It didn't work out that way, but I'm still heavily influenced by comic books. Character designs are really interesting to me. The writer comes up with this character, and hands it over to the artist, who has to take all these attributes and personality, and encode them into an outfit. These are two of my favorites I pulled up, from Doom Patrol and The Sandman.


This piece was the most literal interpretation of that influence. I drew out a page of comic book art, and began to knit it pixel by pixel with intarsia knitting. I still am interested in the conflict between mass produced, instant gratification objects (comic books) being turned into such traditional, time consuming craft work. It's not something I'm focusing on now, but it was an interesting detour and really brought my drawings back into my fiber work.


This piece started to delve a little more into character and setting. The sense of past/future in my work now is present, and that framing of the face, along with the horn motif and thickness of work all sort of informed what came after.


My inspirations from illustration really started to bleed into film by way of concept art and costume design. Movies are perfect examples of the sort of world building I'm interested in. Blade Runner (on the right) is one of the best movies I've seen for this--the costumes and sets were so incredibly perfect.


Thoughts about film and performance brought me to making this work, the Two Headed Boy. It was the clearest narrative I'd developed, and for the first time, I realized how craftmanship and material really contributed to the integrity of the piece. Despite the total ridiculousness of the piece, the jeans were well-made and strong enough that they were perfectly believable. You accepted it, and were able to move on to looking at the story behind it.


Movies not only brought in the idea of narrative, but also of context. The costumes don't exists in a vacuum--the set and surrounding inform them, give them somewhere to live. And yes, I do often look at children's or young adult movies for this--the sets are usually more interesting.


These two pieces were part of a sort of earlier spur of work involving furniture, but I think they also had something to do with the installations I've moved into. I love the process of constructing.


I'm going to stop off here for tonight so I can get a bit of sleep. It's a good place to break off, my recent work picks up where this leaves off. Will try and finish tomorrow.