The Textile Sampler

The last couple of weeks I have been involved in a series of workshops involving co-design in the fields of fashion and textiles. It's part of TED PhD student Jen Ballie's final project of exploring the concept of live collaborative research through digital means such as facebook and blogger. There are 9 of us in total, all at different stages in our textile careers! The brief we have been set is to create scarves with a timeless quality in our ever evolving fashion industry. We have only had two face to face meetings so far, and the aim is to add influential imagery and ideas to the Textile Sampler blog. We can give each other feedback and see everyone's thought processes. It's a very exciting and fast paced project which will draw to a close next friday with the printing of the final scarf designs. I defining our brief, we decided to draw influence from some of the following themes-

COLOUR CLASH
BOLD, BRIGHT COLOUR
COLOUR BLOCK
PATTERN CLASH, E.G. HORIZONTAL VS VERTICAL STRIPE
ETHNIC PATTERN
TRADITIONAL TECHNIQUES, E.G. QUILTING/PATCHWORK

I particularly liked the ideas of clashing colour and pattern like Betsey Johnson and Thakoon in their Autumn 11 collections.



Betsey Johnson



Thakoon


I had already experimented with combining vertical and horizontal stripes in my knit sample, but wanted to take this to a more extreme level!



I decided to do some hand illustrations combining clashing patterns and colours. The initial rows of hearts was an idea as an alternative to the plain straight stripe. The images that follow are my experiments with colour and marks and appear extremely stylized. Scans of the images will be manipulated and will hopefully end up on the final scarf.








My, Maria and Vita's collaborative mood board developing.