TextISLE Project, Making a Coat

I was selected as a textile producer to take part in TextISLE as part of Showcase Ireland 2017. The brief was to work with a designer to produce a garment using yarns sourced from Donegal Yarns. I choose to work with a bespoke tailor in Dublin by the name of Ilona Berezina. 
we started working on the project in October 2016 with very different ideas of what we wanted to achieve, but that's the beauty of a collaboration where you arrive in the middle after numerous conversations is a unique surprise to both of us. 
Initially we settled on a silhouette and set to designing the fabric, A feature of my weaving is a gradient colour change through the fabric and I wanted to incorporate this into the coat. with this in mind we had to design the fabric in such a way that each colour change hit the body in the right place and allow for shrinkage after weaving and washing. this was fun but i managed to weave it. 
Ilona made several mock up options around the silhouette we had discussed however when the fabric was in the hand it had its own idea of what it wanted to do. So in effect the coat came into existence telling us exactly what to do with it. In the end we were not too far away from where we started little changes are big changes when you making something by hand. 
The fabric and the coat are inextricable linked any other fabric would have produced a different coat. 

It was hard work but great fun to do this project I would highly recommend a collaboration to open you eye to possibilities you cant see yourself. sometimes you can stand too close to something.