Billie

I started work on the new collection this week and I've been sharing some of the progress on Instagram. The collection will be called Billie and should be finished by mid May. I like to write a little story about the namesake of each collection to sort of set the mood and work out the inspiration, so here's Billie's story.

Billie lived in a small town by a big lake. The weather was beautiful every day and the houses were painted in pastel colours. Billie loved when the fair came to town every summer. Her favourite ride was the ferris wheel where she could watch all the people from above. She dreamed of opening up an ice cream shop in the main street with a fairground theme - she'd sell fairy floss, popcorn and toffee apples, and play the Beach Boys all year round.

There'll be lots of soft, sweet colours and plenty of print with a bit of sparkle too. I've been working on fabrics this morning, and I accidentally spilled highly concentrated yellow dye all over the kitchen bench. Because I'm hilarious and love puns, I tweeted that it was a 'dyesaster'. Ha! Hmm. Anyway I now have bright yellow hands, my kitchen smells like bleach and I have learned that fabric dye won't permanently stain marble bench tops, but it will try it's best. 

Follow me on instagram to keep updated with the progress of the collection!

Hand dyed fabrics for new collection

Before I left Australia, I visited my mum and we had a fun day hand-dyeing lots of fabrics with different shibori or tie-dyed techniques. Most of these techniques involve folding, scrunching or rolling fabrics up and then dyeing them - so you never really see what the final design looks like until it's completely dried and ironed. I never got to see all of them together, so one of the first things I did when I got into our new apartment was iron all the fabrics and stick them up all over the walls of my work room. I love how they all look together!

I'll be using a lot of the fabrics for the next collection - as you can see the pieces are really small, so anything I make from them will be completely one-of-a-kind!

Can you see that little girl on a t-shirt in the corner? You'll see more of her soon!

Which one is your favourite?

Moodboard for March 2013

Thought I'd share my moodboard for my next collection. It's inspired by busy cities like Tokyo and will feature hand-dyed textiles in moody indigo and grey, with touches of citrus yellow. Geometric shapes and sharp angles balance out the watery look of the fabrics. It'll be a small transeasonal collection - a couple of dresses, some tops,  light outerwear, a couple of skirts and a cute pair of shorts. I'm aiming to have it all finished and in the shop by early March. I've got a lot of other projects to work on at the moment with settling into our new apartment (yes! we moved in on Saturday!), making my wedding dress (!) and a bit of custom work, so I'm giving myself plenty of time to get it all done. Now I just need to wait for my sewing machines & other equipment to arrive so I can really get started!

I should mention that the photos used above & their original sources can be found on my March 2013 Pinterest board.

Summer School Exhibition

For the past two weeks, I've been teaching fashion & textile design to some very cool kids at summer school. Last night they had their graduation and exhibition to show off their work.

 The summer school was held at UTS for year 11 students from priority funded schools. I was amazed at the creativity and talent these kids showed across three areas of design - fashion, visual communication and industrial design. They spent two days learning about each of these disciplines before choosing one to concentrate on for a second project. 

The first project for fashion design was screen printing. The students designed paper stencils and printed on t-shirts and bags. It's a tricky technique to perfect but they picked it up very quickly.

Two awesome examples of making your mistakes work for you. When the girl doing the Patrick t-shirt forgot to put the whites of his eyes in, she painted on some sunglasses. When the text on the Mickey Mouse t-shirt bled, the designer grabbed a paintbrush and roughed it up to make it look more purposeful. I thought her t-shirt had a very 'street art' feel to it, with the black stencil and fluoro orange 'LOVE'.

The second project concentrated on transforming recycled junk into sculptural fashion pieces (it was all very Project Runway!). This dress was a tribute to obsolete technology, using cut up CDs, video tape and a necklace made from broken headphones.

 

Wrapping paper, laser-cutting offcuts, vinyl, and pink safety pins.

Top made from woven strips of garden tarpaulin and an inflatable cactus party decoration. Skirt made from paper, fake flowers and green cable ties.

The industrial design workshops revolved around making lamps, displayed here in front of visual communication's posters.

For their second project, industrial design worked as a group to turn the sample prints and sketches from all of the first three workshops into a beautiful mobile.

Inspirational London

This post has taken me forever to put up, I kept looking at the amount of photos and getting overwhelmed! I wanted to do a post with all the photos from our London trip that relate to my collection. It was a bit late in the project to be gathering inspiration, but it was so much fun to actually be there and finding little details around the city that relate to my textile prints and my colour palette. It renewed my enthusiasm for the project and even gave me a few new ideas to work with! When the collection's done you'll be able to see how all of these images influenced my designs.


Photomosaics made with Big Huge Lab's Mosaic Maker (HUGE timesaver for photo-heavy posts!)

The Never-Ending Fences

In designing textiles for my range I've ended up with three main themes in my prints: maps of London, doors and windows, and fences. Lots and lots of fences. I'd love to say that this is the journey of the fence print from beginning to end, but it's not even close to being 'finished'. I am getting lots of different ideas though, and starting to get better at drawing straight lines freehand. Luckily my teacher likes the hand-drawn style!