Julia Watson – Australia

ZARBELLA Sunset Dream

Category: Modern

Description

My millinery entry “ZARBELLA Sunset Dream” is a representation of “Fusion” the blending, joining, integration, and combination of materials, colours, shapes and ideas to a form a unique and symbolic piece of wearable art. This creation is a fusion of organic elements including straw, cotton lace, and silk with synthetic materials such as wire, beads, crystoform and paint. The piece took 5 months to create, and the primary inspiration was my passion for nature living in rural Central Queensland surrounded by the vast wide open spaces, and an abundance of flora and fauna.

My absolute favourite time of the day is watching the sunset from our back veranda which is indeed a magical time, and I find myself mesmerised by the beautiful hues of colour and serenity the sunset creates. I found myself drawn to a certain components from my surroundings including leaves, colours, textures and shapes and visualising how I could fuse them together to create a natural and organic but edgy, modern and wearable millinery creation. I designed and had made locally two intertwined signature hat blocks in the shapes of leaves to integrate the style of a turban and a crown to form a new design I have called the COBAN. To add a shimmering and 3D look I spent 36 hours hand embroiding thousands and thousands of tiny fuchsia, tangerine and lavender seed beads to create texture and reflect the beautiful colours of the sunset.

I incorporated the dramatic lavender hand cut, shaped and painted crystoform components on the front of the headpiece to reflect the leaves of the Aloe vera plant which I have growing in my garden, and added the 3 floating leaves at the back to represent the colours of the sunset and mimic the naturally occurring scattering effect of colours it creates.

Materials

• Black buntal straw
• wire standard and heavy
• cotton thread
• black raw silk material
• cotton lace
• thousands of seed beads X3 colours
• crystoform
• acrylic paint
• PVA
• Metallic thread to wrap headband

Techniques

• designing and custom making of the signature hat blocks
• hand blocking of the buntal straw shapes
• wiring of straw frame and making of headframe to support the millinery piece
• hand stitching lace to the straw bases
• blocking of silk material to provide straw backing
• hand embroidering thousands of seed beads to the vintage lace (36 hours) cutting
• shaping and painting all the crystoform components