Sadhana's Mixed Bag: The making of 'Forbidden Fruits

Wearable Art is a labour of love

There is no two ways about it.

You have to have the bug,

the passion,the obsession

and to be crazy enough to spend

this much time on a work

that will never give a financial equivalence

to the amount of time and money in materials

that goes into these creations.

However the friendships that are forged

and the excitement that comes with seeing

the works in their finished form
and performing with other artists work

from around the world is something

that is beyond money.

Here is a bit about my work process for 'Forbidden Fruit -Red Yellow Blue'

I decided to enter the

Gen I - Creative Excellence Section

The theme for this section this year

was Art Forms in Nature - be inspired

by the German Naturalist, Ernst Haeckel

Well I looked him up and I was inspired.

Below is the Earnst Haeckel picture

that I based my piece on.

I started with my red piece.

The headdress is made from brown paper bags which I distressed.

I combined these with some clear plastic
loose leaf pages and chocolate wrappers
for sparkle

and some used tea bags.

These were all layered,
hand stitched and machine embroidered until
they became a fabric like media.

I pieced them together and added
a fringe of tooth picks and
basketed one of my hand made cords
around the edge just to make it a little
less spiky for the model.

Inside is dyed and pleated silk
and Turkish lace around the face

The cords in the collar and the dress
are metres and meters long.

To make these I fed a combination
of fishing line, silk yarn
and shredded sari silk
into the machine, twining them
together as I stitched.

Many needles were broken

and many fingers stitched...OUCH!

At the final photo shoot

Mara plaited Suse's hair with yarn

to match the corded collar.

The dress fabric on 'Red' is a woven vintage rayon

dyed with MX dye .

The lining inside the dresses of

'Red' (left) and 'Yellow' (right)

is MX dyed cotton

I had to submit photos for the

first judging round

but we couldn't organise a

shoot before the deadline.

3 busy models and a

sort after photographer

are hard to co-ordinate!

So I took some rough photos

on mannequins outside the studio.

My rough photography

must have been good enough.

With many, many, many

hours spent on the 'Red'

I was running close to the wind

for getting the next two garments completed.

Why did I do three?

For a start sea creatures often travel as a school.

But for me there is also a delight in

photographing my beautiful family

(and some times friends) in my work.

This year was about having a set of photos

with my daughter and two daughter in-laws together.

The person modelling is always a consideration

I regard them as a major part of the design.

For instance I designed 'Yellow' with holes

that make the most of Emma's tattoos at her navel

and also on her feet

The dress is silk that I have shibori dyed

with silk dyes from Beautiful Silks

to get the colour and the form in the cloth.

The top of the hat is, like 'Red',

made of paper shopping bags layered and stitched.

The underside is off cuts of fabric stitched onto

loose leaf plastic sleeves and

melted back leaving holes

to see the dyed silk inside the hat

'Blue' (a blue bottle)
was left with the least amount
of time to complete by the deadline.

If I hadn't particularly wanted
these three girls in the shoot together
I may well have left the entry as one costume.