Something I used to do regularly on my old blog was to share my sketchbooks and design processes… Since I left university I rarely create anything visual in the run up to creating lingerie but it struck me that I’d never actually shared much of my graduate collection (and I’m still in disbelief that it was handed in well over a year ago… How time flies!).

This collection was one of my first major attempts at corsetry. Up until this point, I’d only created two ‘proper’ corsets, both of which had questionable patterning and considerable flaws. Although I can now see many mistakes with this collection, I’m still very proud of what I achieved with it and there are still several pieces that I utterly adore (namely a now-cut-down corset body and sheer cupped corset). The inspiration for this collection arose from three major sources: the painterly patterns in orchids, macarons and a couple of luckily discovered bolts of vintage Japanese kimono silk… Without further ado, here is a peak into my sketchbook. It has been curated in photoshop to omit copyrighted imagery but should still give you a fairly good insight into how my design brain works.

Sketchbook (please click on the images for larger views)

Design development (a brief sample of – there are simply too many pages to share!)

Illustrations and technical drawings

This really is just a snippet of this project… I don’t think I’d ever created such a volume of work in such a short space of time before. There were so many boards of technical drawings, inspiration and mood boards, fabric libraries, technical packs… Not to mention 6 full outfits with obscene amounts of hand sewing embellishment. I am somewhat surprised that I managed to survive this collection!

I’ll end this post with one of my favourite outfits, photographed by my wonderful friend Jenni Hampshire of Sparklewren corsetry, modelled by another wonderful friend Twig. You can see the full collection on the catwalk over on here.

What sorts of things do you find inspiring when you design? Does this collection make more sense now that you’ve seen the sketchbook?