Down the side of each design are the key words phrases and concepts I was trying to include
The poems form a kind of contrasting diptych; The Lamb comes from the collection Songs of Innocence and The Tyger from Songs of Experience.
The dresses are the colours of the animals they represent. They are sized for a child and an adult to reference the different collections the poems come from: innocence and experience respectively. The 'Tiger' dress does fit me, but I have never had an occasion to wear it. There are some more poem-related design features as well.
Both poems feature the word "bright" so I incorporated matching gems as a ‘bright’ linking feature between the dresses.
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| There are black stripe appliqués on the front and back of the dress, but without beading on the back. |
There are black veils on the headpiece and I finished these by melting the edges as the poem contains several references to burning. Also, it’s the neatest way I know of to edge chiffon.
The 'Tiger' dress has a bracelet made of the same feather wool fingerweaving that was used on the 'Lamb' dress as this poem also references The Lamb: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
The straps of the dress are twisted cords for the line “Could twist the sinews of thy heart?” as well as chains for “What the hammer? What the chain”. I wanted a tiger’s eye ring to attach the chains to but I couldn’t find one, so I had to use wood instead (works for “In the forests of the night” I suppose).
The ‘English’ component of the assignment was a rationale about the choices I made in my visual representation (from which the above list is adapted). In the time-honoured manner of ‘design and rationale’ assignments, I did a basic ‘inspired by’ design and made up extra reasons afterwards to reach the word count. For instance there is a zip in the 'Tiger' dress because otherwise you couldn’t put it on, but according to the rationale it represents industrialisation, which my teacher insisted was an important message of the poem.
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| And because the zip is inclined to pull apart I have hooked the elastic gathering the top of the dress to the other side of the zip to hold it together. |
In my final years at school I made something of a habit of handing in dresses for assignments, so much so that English teachers began to fore-warn each other about me and I would get special handouts about clothes in Shakespeare’s time and such.
Costuming was a fairly new hobby for me at the time I made these dresses. It was while completing this project I came to realise how much I enjoyed it.
