Hard to believe I've already been working at Perform Group for almost three weeks! This summer is flying by! This photo is of one of the hallways by the design department - they are lined with photos of old Curtain Call/Alpha Factor costumes!
The week started off exciting – we had a fire drill on Monday morning! The first day that we were here, Sharon, who is in charge of the design/pattern/sample depts. for evacuation, showed Ashley and me where to go when the alarm goes off so we were prepared. She had warned us that we would probably have one this summer. We stood around in the parking lot for a few minutes and then got to come back inside. Fire drills are a lot easier when you aren’t the one responsible for making sure everyone is out of the building – I can sympathize with Sharon. The rest of the day was spent working on designs for Alpha Factor Aerials, the workout/pro shop line. Ashley and I are each doing four designs. I don’t know that any of our designs will actually end up in the catalog at this point but we are learning the entire process. Sara showed us the templates they use – all the illustrations for Aerials, Alpha Factor (competitive gymnastics line) and Curtain Call are done in Illustrator – which I love. The only thing I don’t love is that I’m using CS2 L I’m so spoiled at school with CS5.
On Tuesday, we worked more on the Aerials designs. Ashley and I walked around the back of the warehouse and looked at/swatched some of the overstock fabrics to inspire us more. Sara also gave us the project information for our Alpha Factor design project – three leotards and a warm up jacket. In the afternoon we did some research for that – pouring over catalogs from years past and looking at competitors designs on their websites to spot trends. We also put together a trend inspiration board for Hip Hop/Tap/Jazz for a presentation to the Board of Directors. They plus Mr. King came in the afternoon to see how the design part of the company works so Ashley and I took all the images that the designers had used for research and inspiration for this section and cut out some of our favorites/ones we thought represented the section as a whole best and taped them to a presentation board. Sara also had some finished costumes to show them, along with sketches, cutters musts, the whole process basically.
Wednesday wasn’t very exciting – just working on designs for Aerials and Alpha Factor all day. Soooo, I’m going to write about what we did last Wednesday that I forgot to write about. Last Wednesday, Ashley and I went to one of the last fittings of the year for Curtain Call – again Tap/Jazz/Hip Hop. These are the same outfits we saw photographed but different sizes – each costume is made in adult medium and child medium and tried on at the exact same time by the two fit models. Each patternmaker is there for “her” garments, along with each designer. The adult model is Amy, one of the pattern makers and they bring in a child model – Abby. They would put the costume on, then the designer and pattern maker would check it against the spec sheet and the sketch. Any adjustments were pinned and written on the spec sheet. Usually it was something simple like the straps needed to be shorter (this was a final fitting, not an initial so most adjustments had already been made). Sometimes the costume was fine and nothing needed to be changed.
Today, Ashley and I worked on designs most of the day. Right before lunch, we went into the pattern room and talked to another Amy (there’s a lot of them here ) about the pattern drafting limitations for Alpha Factor and her role. Things like how many layers you can have, how big points need to be on cutouts, glitz vs laser stones, etc. We also watched Jessica, one of the designers, put together the layout for Holiday 2011 Aerials. All week the sample leos have been coming in for approval/snapshots so they can line up models, etc.
It was super hot out (95) so we didn't go for a walk like normal. Usually, we take a walk either in the morning or afternoon as a little break but it was too hot today :-(
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