im just going to, im just going to let you down.

Today I finally managed to make it onto the lasercutter and start to see how my pattern will work. Earlier on this week we were told that our toile material which is paper nylon had all ran out and so we were going to have to either make it out of scraps we could find or paper and then later in the week calico was a mentioned substitute fabric. I abandoned my idea (or have so far) of doing a top and skirt which was a dress combo as seen in previous photos of my work and decided because of the lack of fabric i would concentrate on the top section firstly. Within this I thought developing my lasercut pattern and putting it onto illustrator etc and then cutting it out of paper to see that it would work was the first thing i should do. Cutting it out of calico at this stage didnt seem a good idea as for the top i want to join the shoulder seems and crossover jaw sections with the sonic welding machine and these machines can only be used with synthetic fabrics. As you can see from the photos above I scanned my drawing of the leopard skull into photoshop and then saved this as a jpeg image and put it into illustrator. The shape of the skull is the pattern piece for this top, four skulls will form the shape, with two making up the front two panels and two making up the back two panels. These will then be sonic welded as i said before at the shoulder seams and then hang down like a bib. The top section of the skull as you can see is straight and quite thick (seam allowance) and this will act as the seams.
After i had transferred the image into illustrator i then created a new layer and using the pen tool firstly for the outline and then the pencil tool i drew over this skull shape to create black lines that would be picked up on the epos software in the lasercutting room. I saved this file as an older version of illustrator as the software in the lasercutting room isnt updated enough to register the latest versions of illustrator and then began the long process of queuing to use the machine ! i decided to queue upstairs on the fourth floor, as the lasercutter is a lot bigger and i want to work with this one in the end if i do decide to do my skirt as i will be using big panels of fabric and lasercutting skulls out of the bottom section so i felt it was better to familarise myself with that machine. When i got onto the computer in the room i opened up my skull pattern file into epos the programme used and then went through the process of picking which lines would be engraved and which ones would be cut out colour coding them. After this i then layed the pattern paper i was using flat in the machine put the lid down and using buttons on the sidd of the machine positioned the laser over the section i wanted to be cut and then sent my print to the machine !!! as you can see from the photos all of the skull was cut out as i didnt ask previously whether paper could be engraved which i would definetely make sure i did before doing this again as i wasted valuable time, I took photos of the skull whilst still on the lasercutter to show the overall shape of it if it had been engraved and some sections cut and i am happy with it, i still believed the fabric we were using for our finals could be engraved as previously when we asked lecturers they said yes it could but when asked again said no it couldnt ! I dont know whether there was a communication problem at this stage when we first enquired and if so next time i definetely need to make sure i ask several times about things firsthand to make sure i get all the information i require as i now have to go back to my pattern and figure out a way to make my pattern work ! This week ive come up against alot of obstacles and lecturers not being on hand to help as third years are well under way with their projects but i keep reminding myself that it is a good thing to learn that making mistakes is sometimes a good thing as long as you learn from them and my pattern may turn out even more interesting now i have to think of a new direction to go with it. Also i need to be ready to tackle problems of not enough fabric/space/time to do everything i want to when i work in the fashion industry so better to learn it now in my first year when it doesnt matter as much !