Hmm... Maybe life will be okay

Our DS 151 (now DS 153) class final project was to embellish a plain jacket pattern to make a jacket. At first I was a little upset because the pattern was, well, very plain, and I wanted to make something really cool and over the top. So right after getting the assinment, I went online ato look at jacket patterns. I found some patterns (via Vogue patterns website) that were really cool! Then I asked my professor if it was okay to use those. She said no because it defeated the purpose of altering. In previous years, she had allowed other students to do what I wanted to do, but they all missed the mark because they relied on the original pattern--exactly the opposite point of they assignment. And whe I thought about it, she was totally right! All I was going to do was change fabrics on the sleeve. That's not a lot of altering, despite how hard the fabric is to use (I wanted to use faux fur).
In the end I was really happy with the requirements because I learned a lot of skills that I think I'll use later.
Now, a little side story before I post the pictures. The added bonus of making an awesome jacket was that it would be displayed in the TASA (the school's organization for apparel design students) fashion show. Only 10-ish would be picked. This "prize" totally blinded me. I wanted to do so much so that I would be picked. In the beginning I made sketches for ridiculous designs. I say ridiculous because in the time allotted, the plan was too complex. Then I made these three dimensional shapes to be added. The trick was that they could be zipped off to be made easier to wear That was a issue cause I didn't know how to sew the darn things on (I do now.. tehehe). So finally I was like, I'll just do a zipper thing where I add a piece that can be zipped on and off to lengthen the jackt at will. I even made two pices so that the lengthening pieces could be different. This was a nice idea, however, it totally kicked me in the *ss.
When the judges cam around they really liked my jacket. Correction: they really liked the top half of the jacket. So they decided to have the top on display instead of the bottom (yay!). However (here's where the story starts to get sad), they couldn't take the bottom part off. So they didn't put my piece on display.
Lesson learned: simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. D*mn.
I was so disappointed that I was not going to put the pictures up. But then I realized that would be against the purpose of this blog! I'm here to tell the story of my new journey, and that includes failures. Heck, those failures are where I learn key things. Because of my jacket, I've leared about the importance of keeping things reasonable under time constraints. This helped me so much that I've been able to do even better this semester (you'll see what I mean in the next post... hint, hint). I also learned to no get blinded by the prize. While it is good to dream big, it's also important to make sure that creations happen naturally. All of those extra elements were only added because I thought of what would get me in instead of what would help enhance the jacket (this lesson was one of the key elements of this past week's episode of Project Runway).
So in conclusion, I'm happy with my jacket. The top half is really good, and I learned a whole lot of good stuff from it.... I just wish the judges figured out how to work the zipper :-P

(PS: it took forever to figure out how to post these pictures, and I'm still not happy with the layout! I want to add captions, but I can't figure out how to!)