New lace vest and new stock in the shop!

Its slightly image heavy for all those people who enjoy looking at me (Not!)

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Project Wilderness delivery time

On Saturday I travelled to Dublin to deliver the pieces for the project called Wilderness, by Agata Stoinska of Dlight Studios (http://d-lightstudios.com/) and Eddie Shanahan (http://designerdublin.ie/tag/eddie-shanahan/)

Here I am posing in a piece made by Niki Collier, a local designer from Dublin.

CRAFTed Programme

This year is the first year when CRAFTed is run nationwide. It allows craftspeople to develop custom planned craft workshops with local schools. Each craftperson works directly with teacher with whom the workshops are delivered.
 

After a series of preparatory meetings: such as child protection training etc, we finally got paired with teachers from our designed schools.  

I loved the idea that both the teacher and a craftperson had the opportunity to meet and develop a theme round which the series of five 2 hour workshops will be run.


There are essentially two teaching approaches: one is whereby the craftperson is focused on teaching the skills and the process of making. Whilst it often delivers quality product it can sometimes be limiting for childrens creativity.

 Say a good example is if i am making felted bowls, i will be giving kids set plastic templates, that are essentially one shape. Its better to allow kids to design their template and explore it from there. This approach is more difficult as kids are more likely to make some mistakes in the project.

But what mostly excites me about is the possibility to let the creativity grow and flow. More importantly is to run such a project in a wider perspective, that is to explore the main theme and process so it seamelesly fits in the curriculum.

 Ie: feltmaking can be treated as an example for science of materials, where juxtaposition between soft/ coarse wool and dense,sparse could be used to exemplify different properties of the material and design possibilities.

The project can also touch upon math ( say calculate the cost of materials and work used to create the item versus the hypothetical price).  History, English and Geography can follow in the same manner.

Project Wilderness application

This week is dominated by preparation of custom pieces for project Wilderness  by Agata Stoinska, fashion photographer and Eddie Shanahan, the biggest man in the Irish branding world.
The pieces are inspired by my understanding of wild chaotic elegance. The concept is based on multitude repetitiveness of one pattern.

In my design process I am influenced by the materials i already got in my stash.. Ie. I had over a 600 leaves cut out from pre-felt left hanging around in my stash..

What to do? I decided to dye them in a mix of red, orange and viOlet so they resemble fire!
Next i dyed some felt fabric..
Since my pattern making skills are next to nothing i just draped the fabric on the mannequin and cut slits here and there to fit it to shape.

I think it worked out very well!
I sew the remaining leaves starting at the bottom of the jacket. Finishing it with a ribbon. The jacket is substantial but feels very light thanks to the fabric.

The second piece is more romantic, the lace pattern adds to surface interest and the hood makes the model look more mystical. I have to change the shape of the hood since it came out very shallow. Not sure what color to dye it though.