Cloud computing tornado of destruction

All the images have been deleted from my blog so please forgive the round grey 'no entry' signs that have magically replaced them. Gradually, piece by piece, I will re link all the photos but it's going to take a while!

In the mean time and as a peaceful interlude, here is a picture of a lovely rug I recently had the pleasure of walking on.

Rosie xx

Adventures in shirt making and blindfold drawing

I have far too much fabric. I have owned some of it for so long that it has moved house with me on more than one occasion. Whenever I cave in and buy a fabric that doesn't have a specific purpose I am usually thinking, "Oooo that would make a nice pair of trousers." Whenever my boyfriend happens to be with me when I am organising/rifling through my existing collection (which stretches floor to ceiling in our fairly small flat) he usually picks up one of two fabrics and says "That would make a nice shirt."

I do a lot of sewing for DIYcouture and also try and steal the time to make the odd piece for myself. I have made bits and bobs of clothing  for my sister but when it comes to Joel I have only ever got as far as making him a case for his chaos pad (a very small electronic musical instrument) and a laughably oversized bean bag.

I decided to set aside the time to make Joel a shirt. I picked from my stash a Liberty fabric that I bought  on Goldhawk Road at least seven years ago and copied one of Joel's existing shirts.

 I invested in a dressmakers pattern cutting board (essentially a big piece of card with a grid marked onto it), which I learned about from Claire-Louise of  The Thrifty Stitcher. She showed me how to use the board to anchor bits of a garment flat in order to trace its true shape. I put carbon paper face down directly on top of my fabric, with the shirt pinned on top and drew out the various segments of the short with a tracing wheel.

My work was top secret as the shirt was a Christmas present. Here is the finished shirt modelled by Joel.

I am proud of the crispness of the collar so here is an indulgent collar shot!

The shirt has been put on regular circulation in Joel's wardrobe so has had a few outings into the real world of London. Here it is at The Wellcome Collection, along with a crayon drawing of a daydreaming horse. 

The Wellcome Collection has a room dedicated specifically to doodling. It is equipped with crayons and pieces of blank card. On the back of the card is a stream of words that visitors are invited to draw. The wall at the end of the room is a constantly changing gallery of visitors doodles that staff choose to display. We found this one of various hair dos. If you have any idea what area of the human body the drawing third from left on the bottom row depicts, please do let me know!

The Wellcome has a slideshow of these doodles online and it is worth checking out. This is Joel's illustration of me as Nosferatu.

The shirt ended up at another public drawing session when Joel helped me run the DIYcouture table at the DIY Cultures zine fair. This is what the DIYcouture table looked like.

Dimitri Pieri ran a collective blindfold drawing session with an absolutely enormous piece of paper. Anyone standing idly around was handed a blindfold and a piece of charcoal and contributed to creating a big piece of art on the floor.

Here is the shirt hard at work.

And here are various other shirts hard at work. Who knows, some of them may also be homemade : )

Despite the wrinkled nose, I think Joel is happy with his Liberty print shirt. I was aiming to make The Perfect Shirt but if I ever make him another I will lower the neck line at the back and also attempt long sleeves with a real cuff.

Navigating the internet in an orderly manner

Pinterest has been around for a couple of years on the world wide web, but has just launched officially in the UK. When I first heard about Pinterest, I wasn't interested in creating an account. I already have a Tumblr account which I love. It is a wordless stream of images that inspire me and I love the weird, dark, psychedelic corners of that particular online world. I felt Pinterest didn't fill a specific need of mine and would therefore become just another account for me to manage. It also seemed to be a place where people collected images of products they wanted to buy, which didn't interest me.

I was coaxed reluctantly into joining by Melanie Bowles of The People's Print. We were running a collage-based fabric design competition together, and Melanie believed we should create public mood boards that people entering the competition could use to inspire their design process. Melanie invited me to join her 'I have no fear of depths' board , which focusses on joyful abandonment and the beauty of deep unknown oceans. I created 'We shall not cease form exploration' which collects images of explorers and adventurers of the skies, the seas and the wild recesses of planet earth, including these: 

It was clear that all three of the winning designs had been created with inspiration from our mood boards.

As I have mentioned before on this blog, I am naturally prone to physical disorder, though I am a big fan - almost a worshiper - of orderliness, which I strive towards at all times. This is my desk area at probably it's most tidy. 

I am also a naturally visual person, and find things most easy to understand when they are presented in a visual way. This is the reason I originally started making illustrated sewing instructions, and also why I love a good infographic! I am a ceaseless list writer and often my lists take visual form. This is the list I jotted down when ideas for styling the next DIYcouture photo shoot were keeping me awake one night.

Pinterest therefore works with my brain very well. Unlike a blog that shows a vertically linear stream of posts, Pinterest allows me to collect a number of images into a group. In a way this allows me to 'keep' them, almost like a visual form of internet favourites.

The following images are from the Pinterest board I created to help focus my ideas for styling the next DIYcouture photo shoot (which will show the clothing created from the winning fabric designs). This image of palm leaves was originally posted on a Tumblr called Eidetica.

This image was originally posted by Susie Bubble as part of a blog post about inspirational styling and photography. The imaged was pinned by textile designer Francesca Colussi. 

Alone, they are great images. As part of a group of pictures that I have curated, they take on different meaning.

I have collected these images with purpose and return to them in the build up to my shoot as I build props, cover old shoes in new fabric and design backdrops. In this way, Pinterest has become a very useful tool to me and I must thank Melanie for forcing me to use it.

Pinterest are now promoting their services specifically to a UK audience and have launched a 'Pin It Forward' campaign, where bloggers discuss how they use Pinterest and introduce other bloggers who find Pinterest useful. I must say they are not paying us to do this and I  am happy to encourage people to sign up, as I needed that extra push to sign up too. If you are now interested in Pinterest, please do sign up and follow my boards. Rather than running word searches, I find it useful to seek out designers I like who have Pinterest accounts and see where their boards take me, so I do hope mine can lead you down some unexpected online avenues.

Thanks to Lucy Kate Crafts who introduced me yesterday and now it's my turn to introduce Cathryn Clarke from A Crafty Chai, whose pinning activities you can follow here. 

Monochrome and parrot coloured

When I designed the collections for my DIY Couture mega book I wanted to show that the items clothing could be made to look minimal and striking. As a fabric lover, it is often tempting to pick busy prints that are lovely in and of themselves. If one always does this however, one can end up dressing like one's Grandmother's patchwork quilt. I thought it would be challenging and useful to show a collection of home sewn clothes made with just black and white fabrics.

I often tend to design a collection for someone in particular. I usually choose a model before I make my collections not only so that I can make the clothes to fit, but as I like to be inspired by the person I am making for. I chose my sister to model what became known as the 'Monochrome Art' collection. A naturally stylish lady, my sister Hannah dresses un-fussily and I can't remember the last time I saw her wearing a strong colour.

Above is the collage mood board I made before designing the collection, with pictures of Hannah at the bottom left. These are the final illustrations of the Monochrome Art collection.

And this is what they looked like modeled by Hannah, photographed and displayed in the book.

There is something beautifully simple about black and white. It can be sensible, deadly serious, but cartoon-like at the same time. Monochrome made it's bold, colourless voice ring loudly at a few of the big catwalk shows for SS13, particularly Louis Vuitton and Moschino.

This graphic, 60's inspired Moschino look has found it's way into the online DIY world with tutorials popping up all over the place, including this brilliant one by Marlena on the Rookie Mag site, explaining how to turn two T-shirts into one striking slip dress.

I bought some black and white printed fabric from Offset Warehouse a few months ago and decided I would make my own head-to-toe monochrome outfit. This fabric is fair trade and has been hand printed by a women's co-operative in India.

I used the same McCall's pattern that I used to make my pink high waisted trousers but planned to allow a bit more room to move, as the monochrome fabric did not stretch at all.

I added the same extension at the top and dropped the crotch slightly.

I worked under the watchful gaze of my pet eyeball!

Here are the finished trousers. I love them, though the fabric is quite thin and lends itself more to summer wear than to the endless cold winter we are experiencing in the UK at the moment. I'm wearing the trousers with a jacket I got at a second hand shop in Liverpool last summer.

I looked up the 'Sundance Dance Club,' who's logo is embroidered on the back, and they still exist!

I cropped the trousers fairly short, but I need to wear them with socks firmly pulled up in this weather.

I picked up some striped jersey on Goldhawk Road and decided to make a T-shirt with it. I often end up playing drums in shop-bought vests, but would like to gradually replace them with homemade clothes. I made this T-shirt with drumming in mind.

Spot the deliberate mistake! I wish I could say it was deliberate, but I did absent mindedly sew the sleeve to the neck hole!

I self-drafted this T-shirt, just making some simple changes at the shoulder to distinguish the back from the front. I drew out a bit of facing for the neck edge at both front and back. I slipped a piece of A4 paper behind the neck and used a pen to roughly mark out the right shape.

I used this paper as a pattern piece to cut my back facing andthen repeated this for the slightly different front neckline.

I look quite grumpy here as it is freezing cold and I am wondering why the hell I'm taking photos of myself in the back yard without a jacket.

If you look closely you might spot a flash of bright orange! Try as I might, I cannot master 100% monochrome. Colour is too much fun! This flash of orange is a ring designed and made by my sister.

My boyfriend bought me the ring for my birthday, in a sneaky transaction that took place under my very nose without me noticing. Here is the ring in a more colourful setting. It is based on the shape of an eagle's head, though the neon orange is definitely more parrot-like.

By coincidence, it is a similar colour to some of the clothing in the Acid Candy collection, displayed next to the page full of miniature versions of my sister in my book : )

It smells, it rattles and it tweets like a bird

It's my birthday tomorrow and the staff at my workplace Bag Books made me a special multi-sensory birthday 'card.' Here it is for you to see, though simply looking at it does not really do it justice.

The heart is a small, strokeable cushion made of soft fleece. The spider has indestructible rubber legs that can be pulled and stretched. The little bird at the bottom left is actually a sound pad, which chirrups when pressed.

As I love drinking coffee, I have been treated to a scattering of real coffee beans that give of a beautiful aroma. The carrot cushion is hanging from a drum stick, which can be taken off and used to hit stuff!

To top it off, the whole glorious creation can be worn as a necklace. I intend to wear it to the very end of the pier at Southend-On-Sea tomorrow. This is the longest pleasure pier in the world and I'm sure the weather at the very tip will add to my multi-sensory birthday experience!

I am an artist and I nail my pictures together

Entries are rolling in to the DIYcouture fabric design competition, which is really nice to see. Since it launched last week, I seem to be finding collage everywhere I turn.

The Tate Britain is currently showing an exhibition of the famous collage artist Kurt Schwitters, who fled Germany when his art was labelled 'degenerate' by the Nazi government. Collage is really the art of arranging stuff, and Kurt Schwitters brings all sorts of objects as well as images into his work. The title of this post is a Kurt Schwitters quote. He says of his materials, "I could see no reason why used tram tickets, bits of driftwood, buttons and old junk from attics and rubbish heaps should not serve well as materials for paintings."

Collage art is alive and thriving in the 12st Century too. There are various online websites and magazines dedicated to contemporary collage art, including Kolaj and Notpaper. I've found some inspiring work there, including a series called Ice Cream Kingdoms by Jesse Treece and Delilah Jones. 

Ice Cream Kingdoms by Jesse Treece and Delilah Jones

And another series called Peyote Poems by Brandon McLean.

Peyote Poems by Brandon McLean

Collage has the ability to look both modern and nostalgic at the same time. I suppose collecting materials to use in a collage is a bit like treasuring tickets, napkins and photos from a particular holiday, conjuring up a similar romantic view of a specific time that has passed. This  interview with contemporary collage artist Laura Redburn includes various pieces of her work that have a definite vintage feel, but also somehow look like a trip to the future.

My first experiments in collage were for my book launch last summer. There are a lot of illustrations in my book showing the variety of ways each piece of clothing can be made. I thought it would be fun to turn these into a paper doll, so that people could dress mini versions of themselves up in the clothes.

I experimented with a miniature me, dressing myself up in red faux leather trousers and a canary yellow hoody and placing myself in an idyllic Swiss mountain landscape.

Whilst hunting for books that could be cut up in the local charity shop, I even found this paper doll poodle! 

The thing I found most fun about collaging was that I had plan - a vague, fuzzy one - when I started, but the materials surprised me as I arranged them, and what came out was nothing I could have visualized before hand.

The same could be said for all the collages that were made on the night of the book launch party. Time and thought has no doubt gone into the work created by collage artists above, and the results are sublime; melancholy, evocative, romantic and striking in their beauty.

The collages made at the book launch were made for fun not for results, often with a pint of beer in hand, whilst chatting to friends and strangers. The results are funny, garish, playful and downright odd, and I love them. Below are some of the creations I managed to scoop up at the end of the night and I'd like to present them here as a gallery of wild, exuberant imagination.

I love that this one manages to look like a football outfit and a shield at the same time. If you look closely the man is wearing high heeled boots made of sweets.

Apart from the flying sting ray this is probably the most sensible collage of the night.

If you look closely at that white dress it has an enormous vertically positioned eye adorning the skirt.

A fairly aggressive statement from a man in a glittery skirt and a magenta wig!

The collage corner is now a regular feature of the monthly Make Escape night above the cinema in Hackney and I'm looking forward to hosting a similar collaging session at Drink, Shop & Do next Monday, March 18th in London. I'll be bringing along various materials including my enormous back catalogue of National Geographic magazines and plenty of coloured paper.

Melanie Bowles, author of this book about digital textiles design will also be on hand, and together we'll be helping people turn their mixed media doodling into a repeated design that can be printed onto fabric. It's always fun to make things in a sociable environment, as opposed to alone at home, and I look forward to seeing the wondrous creations that emerge from the night.

If you're intrerested in coming along, please check out the details here : )