Bye bye Prada.. hello leather!

So after destroying a no less than perfect Prada bag, I have the real leather i have been after for a week! Okay.. well it was a lot less than perfect actually.. it had a broken strap.. and without that you cant really call it a bag.. for something that was suppose to sit on your back, and most definitely was not a clutch! However.. it did still hold things.. so technically it is a bag but the magnet was gone.. and that's a vital piece I guess when making sure nothing escapes!
Well this bag.. i mean "bag" is now in shreds.. and ready to be stitched up into a lovely book with my 'rafia' so that it can 'explore the worllldddd' with a little imagination.. as it'll be going no further than the distance between my class and my room, but it'll look like it's travelled the world with a little distressing of fabric, punching into it and carving shapes and lines into the beautifully cut leather by Prada, at least it'll be a damn expensive book! ;)

Researching all week into the life of the African tribes and the Burmese women left me with the idea of creating a "Fashion travel back in time journal" exciting huh! Looking at how fashion now has been influenced by fashion back then, I thought it was the perfect thing to do especially as everyone is so into this Aztec/African prints and lines and shapes and things at the moment, they're all over the catwalk! - talking of which, check out Issey Miyake spring/summer 2001 .. so beautiful! I know its not fashion of right now, but it all tributes..


I can't find a clip of it to show you from you tube, but here's a photo I found (:

Tomorrow I'm off to the Pitt Rivers exhibition which is in/ part of the Natural History museum.. I believe.. correct me if I'm wrong, I have not done my research yet, please forgive me. But I'm ever so excited! Gayle tells me its amazing.. She wont stop going on about the shrunken heads! Although I am also just as excited about these and I haven't even seen them yet! However I have been making some of my own out of latext at college! I'm planning to sew into them on the front of the leather bound book, and I'm hoping for dear life that its all going to come together, as today i had a pretty 'shit' day to say the least, I was so into this project at the start but today I just kind of lost my train of thought.. although I'm hoping that the Pitt Rivers exhibition will put me back on track!- I'm sure it will.
First experiment with creating "shrunken heads".

I made this by dipping a dolls head into a pot of latex, and drying each layer as i took it out, i really like the shape of this head to be a shrunken on the book, although the features aren't defined enough, so I tried 2 other ways, one from making a clay cast of the dolls face, and one from making a mod-rock cast. these 2 came out really well, however they are drying at college so I'll post photo's of them in my next post hopefully!