End of Year Show - sourcing fabric

Referencing this image gave us a starting point to gauge which type of material we wanted to use in the draping over the model. While the image is of a statue and so not a fabric, but instead a rigid medium which is then painted metallic gold, the shine of the metallic caught our eye and was a perfect representation of gold, as it was the stereotypical gold effect.

We looked online to source fabrics, looking at different types of gold and metallic fabrics, as well as material types. The fabric we liked the look of the most was a foiled fabric, which would give a similar effect to the statue above. We figured out that we would need a length and width of at least 2 metres squared, 3 if we needed some allowance either side. We looked on sites such as eBay which sells lots of fabric for dressmaking. However on this site, we could only find fabric with a width of 1.5 metres maximum, so we thought we would have to get 2 cuts of the same fabric and sew them together to fix this problem. However, this created the problem of an obvious seam in the fabric which we would have to hide in the photoshoot. Instead we looked at other fabric sites such as myfabrics, which had our perfect material on, however due to the shipping dates and the fabric coming from germany, we could not guarantee it would arrive in time for the photoshoot.

We decided instead to visit the market to find a fabric that would be suitable for the project. Looking first at B&M fabrics, there were a number of gold fabrics in there, including sequins, and a dirty gold fabric which was not very metallic. The foil material had sold out in both the store and the stall inside the market unfortunately, and they could not guarantee when it would be back in stock. We went to the stall next door instead and found a fabric that would work for our project. While not being foil, the fabric was gold and more metallic than any we had found so far. With editing, we thought the colour could be adjusted slightly to make it look darker gold, similar to the foil. Using Emma as a model we draped the fabric over her, which allowed us to check the dimensions would be suitable for us.

We also bought safety pins which could allow us to manipulate the sheet and the way it drapes over the model, which will come in handy during the photoshoot to create a look of obvious draping as opposed to just covering the model.