Development in Textiles

Developing on from the textiles experiments I have been exploring and designing, I am now going to decide out of the materials which one worked well for me and the fabrics I enjoyed working with. I started by going back to the beginning and looking through all the worksheets with annotations I have produced.

After spending time looking through all the samples, I decided that the sample which I had spent most time on was the Origami Fold. On the worksheets you can see that I have an A3 scanned image of the design, so you can see the detail close up. I also have another A3 worksheet with a clear explanation of how I have made the repeated textiles necklace.

I feel that, for my first sample I have successfully created a piece of clothing using a hand thread which works nicely around the neck of the body as you can see on the photographs I have captured. The triangle pattern repeats in a direction of movement, providing texture from the fabrics.  

From the experiment of the Origami Fold, I needed to improve the design as it used various colours or fabrics and thread. The samples are too far away from each other, so for my development I need to make sure I thread the triangles closer together to create a compacted area.

 I also need to decide what sizes I want the cut out squares to be, if they all need to be the same of different. I can do this by measuring out the scale of a piece of paper, placing it out the fabrics and drawing in pencil around the outline. This means that all the shapes will be controlled by the size I want them to be.

I may even add more detail to the fabric, sticking or sewing other types of materials onto the samples to create more texture. Plain white paper may even give the shapes more volume and movement. Some of the fabrics I collect may not be the colour I want to work with, from the experiments I could use the method of dying the materials using more than one colour.

Before starting the design, I need to pick the colour palette whether it is bright multi-colours, deeper tones, or one colour and what fabric I will be using.

I thought of another idea to create more than one neck piece, with the pattern moving downwards from smaller to larger. This will create and bigger surface area, with more pattern and texture.

I will experiment with the fabrics, colours and sizes before designing my final development.

Karen Casper-

'I’m not going to give in to that pressure. I think if you are clever enough and you are passionate enough you can make it work so you appeal to a broad range.’



Karen Casper a textiles artist who designs a wide range of clothing using different mix medias such as devore, quilting, embroidery, print, fabric manipulation, screen and embellishment to produce fine art pieces and commercial items. She has a passion for all things vintage.


 Karen also creates handmade embroidered headpieces for special occasions like a wedding, christenings or the races. Each headpiece is unique incorporating vintage lace elements and hand dyed to co-ordinate with an outfit. In the past, Casper has used fairy-tale enchantment, childhood memories, vintage fairground and underwater world as inspiration.

Fairground Fun

A piece of her work which I feel inspired by due to the brightness of the textile design is the ‘Underwater love meets primal futurism’ which is a cape (Miss Coral) reflects the 3D embroidered growth cultivation of the natural world using traditional textile techniques of glow in the dark wire with ‘Day’ colours of certain coral species.

Another design which interests me as it is personal to the designer is a theme which she was inspired by from a young age which she calls ‘Fairground Fun’. This work consists of fairground mixed with vintage and distressed using screen/digital print, embroidery, devore, and embellishment and fabric manipulations to produce fine art pieces and commercial items. The piece is in the woodland of a woman modelling the dress, taken by the photographer Andrew Farrington.

Karen Casper as a textile designer focuses on the fashion design root, using the environments fabric to create clothing shown on women with different techniques of mix media. She has given me the inspiration to work with vintage materials such as lace, which she uses a lot in her ‘Head candy& Bridal’ wear, to expand on the fabrics using various methods.