Good Day//

Today I found an old drawing I did in first year of Uni. I scanned it in and used it for a project but I thought I had lost the original drawing. Well, it's a little creased but I'm happy I found it.





Also, this Monday just gone I finally plucked up the courage to do my first Open Mic, I decided to do it at Trof in the northern quarters of Manchester city centre. I wasn't quite brave enough to do it on my own though, so I got my friend to travel over for the weekend, 3 days of practicing together and it went well. It didn't quite go to plan as there were a few mistakes but we managed to cover them up. I didn't want anyone else I knew to be there so no one got an invite. But i'll definatly do it again and this time maybe I won't be trembling so much I can hardly strum the guitar.

Embroidery - Supporting Study

I've recently done another Supporting Study, I chose to do it in Embroidery. Our Brief was to design 6 samples for either a bag or garment using skills we would learn throughout the Supporting Study. The brief was created by Ruth Cox of Oasis. Oasis is a large charity company based in India. They take women and single mothers off the streets and teach them embroidery and print skills so they can earn qualifications and proceed to get jobs. Ruth Cox explained that the designs we came up with would all be assessed and then considered to be taken to Oasis, made there and then sent back to England to be sold. I chose to design for the bag. Although floral isn't my 'thing' I found these delicious vintage fabrics in town for quite cheap and decided my plan was to use a simple shape to repeat and create patterns. I took our 3 week limit into consideration and wanted to keep it nice and simple.

I designed my 6 samples, they're very twee and girly which isn't my normal style but I'm still pleased how they turned out given the fact it was such a short project. They were all different but I made sure they all stuck to a theme and looked like a collection. My samples were one of the collections chosen and taken to India to be considered for Oasis.



This is the only picture I have of the samples, sorry it's not very clear.

Pulled It Out The Bag

Not so long ago I did a supporting study in Uni, which is basically where I get to experience another area of textiles for three weeks, and it can quite literally be doing anything you wish. I choose Photoshop because I always find it useful in my work but there's still loads that I want to learn from it. Our brief was to create a series of designs that could then be used for interior. The theme was Visual Noise. So I spent the first week just drawing little doodles of things that popped in my head so I could scan them into photoshop. I'm going to be honest here they were'nt my strongest drawings, but the skills I learnt in the workshop made them look pretty good. I spent time just putting things together and seeing what I came out with. I got my marks back for it this week and turns out I got 68 which is only two marks off getting a 1st! I was so shocked because I hadn't been able to spend as much time on it as I would have liked to as I had another project running at the same time (and well I'm not that great at juggling projects, something to work on I guess). Time for a little celebration..

Love For Blonde Redhead

Word Of Mouth

So at the moment I'm working on a project where we wrote the brief ourselves. This is first time since I've been at university where they've allowed this and I've loved it so far. I decided to take the advantage of having a project so vastly broad. I decided to start drawing humans and animals mouths in different variations and expressions and then playing around with the drawings on photoshop. Here's some of the stuff I've come up with on photoshop. Ive had this material printed on fabric using digital print. It looks totally 'rad', so once the project is over I'm going to make them into the actual cushions, they'll be about 60cm square.

I've also made a patchwork piece which I handstitched, transfer printed on top of and then made further stitching over the top. This piece feels quite special to me as the fabrics I used in the patchwork are old scraps of materials I've collected over time, for example a couple are from old dolls dress' I had as a youngster.

I Think I Have A Skeleton Obsession

Recently I came across Michael Paulus, now this guy is a genius. I'm mega jealous of the ideas he comes up with. I've been mostly looking at his 'Character Study with Skeletal Systems', this is a study where he's taken 25 different classic cartoon characters and given them a bone structure , I absolutely love the retro feel mixed with the slightly creepy skeleton observations.
This really is such a great idea.

You can buy these from Etsy.com and at $60 a pop it's really not that bad a price for something so beautiful, I'm putting the Charlie Brown skeleton on my birthday list.

The beginning

Right it's not looking good, taken me half hour just to realise how to make a blog entry. Guess we will see how it goes, best crack on..