A work in progress...

For my body contour class we have to make a three piece mini collection for our term project, and one of the pieces has to be a corset. I have no idea what inspired me to do this, but I decided to weave the entire thing out of ribbons. Crazy. Anyways, on Sunday I draped a base out of double faced silk satin and sewed in 9 pieces of boning for structure. Between the stiffness of the satin and all of the boning, this will definitely not be something to be worn for comfort! Thennnn, I started weaving. Since this is not a technique I have used before I am basically making it up as I go along. Last night I got as far as getting all of the vertical ribbons in place, and this morning I started weaving in the horizontal ones. Since this is a pretty intricate (and seriously time consuming) piece, I decided to post some progress pictures.

The double faced satin base.

Getting the vertical ribbons in place.

I am using black velvet, satin and grosgrain ribbons, and dark grey and green grosgrain ribbons.

After 12 hours of sewing and pinning, I had to pin all of those ribbons down so I could go home.

Inside look at boning and all those pins. ugh. I will hand sew in lining to cover up the boning when I am done with the weaving.

The pins have the same effect as a kitten that hasn't been de-clawed...

Once I have all of the ribbons in place, I have to hand sew the entire thing down... I'm really looking forward to that. I'll post more pictures once I've finished, along with the two other pieces in the collection. Which, since this is taking an eternity to complete, are getting more and more simple...

Time to coffee up and get back to work!

P.S. I got a design internship today!! Im super excited!!