Monday 24 September 2012

My Tent home highlights

A visit to Tent as part of the London Design Festival always recharges the creative batteries. 
These are the products I spyed this weekend that would feature in the home of my future...

A W&Q chair....Graphics, colour and pattern are the basic elements that Qiongjie Yu and Siwen Huang use to revive the Chinese tradition of bamboo handicraft.  Their collection shows "...the impact between the designer's creative ideas and folk craftsmen's wisdom."  Fresh, contemporary and playful.
www.cargocollective.com/wandq 

www.cargocollective.com/wandq

 My desk would be an ADAPTable designed by Mami Kim.  "Conceived as a solution to working on a wide range of creative tasks within a small space, the playful design allows for a user's changing needs, maximising suitability from moment to moment."  The surface has 6 interchangeable A4 side panels which slide into position on a rail system.  There is a growing collection of panels incorporating cutting surfaces, steel rulers, classic enamel cup pencil holders to choose from...A quality piece that could grow with you and would get better with age.
www.mamikim.com
www.mamikim.com

On my desk..... would sit an Orée portable wireless keyboard in maple.  Crafted, polished and assembled by hand in Languedoc in southern France, Orée is the result of a unique partnership between a technology entrepreneur, a product designer and a master woodcraftsman.  A beautiful haptic experience.

www.oreedesign.com

My dining table would have to be a SEER table.  Refined, simple, clever.  Superb attention to detail and brilliantly innovative.  From 4 to 8 person seating with never the need to sit straddling a table leg.  Made with responsibly sourced materials I would go for the European oak timber option.
www.seertable.co.uk

My rug? ...a FRONT design by Jan Kath from his Erased Classic collection.  All rugs are hand-knotted in Nepal in line with centuries-old traditions using materials of the highest quality including Tibetan highland wool, the finest Chinese silk, cashmere and nettle fibres.    Its a toss up between the Tabriz Canal Aerial and Tabriz Lexington Sky designs at the moment... 
www.wearefront.com
A very lovely day of design dreaming!

Monday 10 September 2012

Carbooting

Thank you to the lady who sold me the scraps of her father's ties and cravats at the Maypole Carboot on Sunday.  She had made a patchwork quilt out of them and the left-over bits were safety-pinned into coloured bundles ready for sale.  She was really happy that they were going to a fellow patchworker.

Her father, John, had worked in the antiques trade and had apparently been quite a character!
As my ceramic patchwork is being talked about as being an 'Antique of the Future', it's good to think that John, through snip-bits of his fabrics, may rejoin the industry...




Saturday 8 September 2012

Fabric audit

I feel the need to organise and rationalise... a healthy pre-autumn wardrobe cleanse has led to a review of the fabrics I have gathered over the summer months for my ceramic patchworking.  Sourced from charity shops far and wide, it is always interesting to pause and see the overall flavour of what is catching my eye.  The oriental feel continues, as do geometrics, but I'm also loving the odd quirky conversational.  The print always is transformed when patchwoked back onto itself so it will be good to see what happens with these designs.
If any of these jump of out at you for a commissioned Ceramic Patchwork piece then do shout...

red pink oriental silk headscarf
burgundy blue floral headscarf
blue geometric silk hankie

liberty peacock silk scarf
black red geometric silk headscarf
black white silk dress
womad oxfam silk scarf
pleated green silk skirt
swiss silk headscarf
geometric grid headscarf
folk silk headscarf

bovey tracey silk horse headscarf
geometric suns silk top
grey dot geometric headscarf
lornas silk dress