Warehouse Palm Print

Warehouse Palm Print by kelseyireland featuring plastic sunglasses

Collaborative Project

As part of a recent project at Uni, Fashion Communication and Fashion Design worked together. Designers had to design and make a coat and then work in collaboration with one of our fashion communicators to produce a fashion photoshoot were the communicator would then use the images to design a magazine spread to profile the designers work. Below are my favourite of the images I have taken. The coat was designed by second year design student, Melissa Hall and modelled by my friend Elisha Cieslar. I used the photography studio in our university and took some images from the roof top of our university also.

I love the black and white image out of these two. I used metallic lip foil transfers on Elisha's lips and I think the black and white brings out the shine on her lips more, they look fab!

These images were both taken on the roof of Liverpool John Moores University. You can get some fantastic images up there, with great views of the architecture in Liverpool. We are really lucky as students to be able to use the roof for our work.

Our new addition to the family...

Our little kitty :) his name is Simba

Christmas Time...

My favourite time of year :)

Seen Magazine Dress illustrations...

I have recently being drawing, creating and playing about with some illustrations of our magazine dress for 'Seen', here is what I have come up with so far... 

WE WON!!! :)

Our dress was picked by judges Tony Burns (Director of Seen Magazine), Rebecca Keegan (Editor & Director of Seen Magazine) & John Maguire (Brokerage Officer at LJMU)to be modelled at the 'Death by Glitter Ball'. We were all so happy, excited and proud of our work. It was a great achievement for our work to be acknowledged by someone outside of the Uni and who is founder of the magazine.

Amy looked fab in our dress!

Our team were then given the opportunity to attend the ball and to help dress Amy on the evening, alot of us were really excited at the opportunity to go but some had other commitments and were sadly unable to make it.

In the end there was me, Sophie & Ryan who attended the ball. Ryan and Sophie were able to get there earlier than me as I had work commitments but had managed to leave earlier than planned to get to the ball to help dress Amy. They were able to attend Liverpool's photographer Matt Ford's studio to watch him shoot our dress for his blog and for the magazine. His work is excellent and we were all really pleased with final image...

Check out Matt's blog: http://firecrackerfashion.blogspot.com/2011/10/death-by-glitter-vogue-ball-2011.html

At the ball we helped out backstage to dress Amy before the show, there was a great buzz to the atmosphere backstage as everyone prepared to go out on stage...

Left to Right: Sophie Edwards, Amy Faith, Ryan Martin & Kelsey Ireland (me)

Let the show begin...

The show began aprrox 8pm and was split into 5 sections, which were:

* Bizarre

* Solos

* Femme Realness

* Erotica

* Choreography 

Our dress was featured in the 'Bizarre' section so we were one of the first to be up.

We dressed Amy prior to 8 o'clock so we could all go upstairs to watch the show.

Our time came... I could not wait to see Amy strut her stuff down the catwalk in our dress, cameras at the ready... and she was up.

She did and absolutely amazing job and really worked the catwalk using the fans as props along the way.

Photographed by Ching Lee

It was a great achievement for us to see our work getting noticed and how much everyone liked all 3 dresses made by our class. They were so pleased with all of our work that all 3 dresses will be shown at 'Seen Media Awards' next thursday. 

We are all grateful for the opportunity given to us by 'Seen' magazine and all of those involved, and look forward to anything we may be involved in, in the near future and I cannot wait for the Seen media awards as I also have the opportunity to work with the creative communications and live events company 'Meet and Potato which is really exciting... Watch this space! :)

Seen Magazine dress competition for the Death by Glitter Vogue Ball

As Fashion Communication students at LJMU we were recently asked to work to a 48hour brief for a competition for 'Seen' magazine. 

We were split in to 3 groups of approx. 8-10 people and asked to design and make a paper dress out of back issues of 'Seen' magazine which would then be judged by the directors of the magazine. Then the winning dress would then be worn by their model (Amy Faith) at 'the Death by Glitter Vogue Ball' on Saturday 1st October. This was really exciting stuff, as we were working on a live project that would be judged by someone outside of the university.

In our group there were:

Kelsey Ireland (Me)

Sophie Edwards

Natalie Oldershaw

Ryan Martin

Amie Hunt

Charlotte Hunt

Lottie Williams

Charlotte Hyland

Khloe Vaughan 

Harriet Kenworthy

The brief we were given was to make the dress from the back issues and to make it as bizarre,outlandish and theatrical as we could whilst still promoting the magazine.

So we began sharing ideas within our group and drawing down rough sketches of how we think the dress would look. Some of us had also brought in pictures from the internet as research for ideas for the shape and style of the dress. Below is a few I found so you can get and idea of what we were looking at...

Our group decided that we wanted to pleat the pages and make a  skirt so it looked full and we wanted to use odd shapes and have bits sticking out etc so it looked really crazy.


We began tearing out pages from the magazine and folding it to make many pleated fan shapes, that we could then later attach together to make the skirt.

I really liked this shape made by pleating the paper diagonally and the folding it in half. I thought this would be good to use on the top of the dress.

To get things done quicker we chose to work on separate parts of the dress in smaller groups. So the group was split and each working on a task.

Me and Ryan got together to make the top half...

One side of the dress was going to have a large shoulder structure that stuck up & out from the dress that would be loads of pleated front covers of 'Seen' magazine so this would be promoting the magazine showing their logo several times. I said it would be a good idea to make a corset top so it could be easily fitted and removed from the model and also it fitted perfectly with the brief we were given. So we took the front and back covers of the mag and stuck them together long ways to create a long rectangle shape were we then hole punched the ends to thread ribbon or string through to create the corset fastening.

Once the corset shape was made we could begin attaching other pleated pieces and the shoulder piece of front covers to it. We used staples and double sided tape to attach everything together.

This is what the top looked like once we had worked our magic...

Nat, Amie and Charlotte worked together to make the skirt. They started by making a skirt from calico so they could attach the pleated magazine strips to it to make it easy to get on and off. They stapled together strips of pleated magazine pages to make each layer of the skirt. The bottom layer was made from layered front covers from issue 4 which were all the light blue colour. There was then a smaller pleated layer attached over the top of the bottom one to create a nice layered effect to the skirt. These were both fastened using velcro. We checked the size for the dress on one of our group members Sophie who was a similar size to the model from the measurements we were given.

Khloe and Harriet decorated the shoes in theme with the dress, they looked really good, but when Harriet tried them on we had to cut the fans down on the inside of the foot because they were catching on one another as she walked. 

I also made a head dress with help from Sophie to give the outfit to give it that etc WOW factor! We attached small prints of the logo to it to promote the magazine. We then tried it all on Sophie again, we were all a bit unsure of the head dress because it looked a bit to busy and you could hardly see her head...

...but... we were then discussing our design with our tutors who liked the head dress and one of them turned it backwards and put it on Sophie and we loved it! it didn't look to busy, it fit with the dress and it was still promoting the magazine.

The fans were also made for that etc WOW factor and to fit the brief, it was Ryan's idea and the logic behind it was so the model could be hidden behind them and then appear to be 'SEEN'. I thought it was a brilliant idea as the theme for the brief was bizarre and theatrical and the model would be able to use these as props when walking down the catwalk.

All three dresses were then modelled by 'Seen' magazines chosen model Amy Faith in a mini catwalk display put together by our class in our studio. The winning dress would then be displayed at 'the Death by Glitter Vogue Ball'