Daniel Heath

Todays lecture has been one of my favourite so far. Daniel Heath was really interesting and had some great advice for us. He even came back to the studio and we had an invaluable conversation that we were all grateful for. He gave us advice on always taking high quality images of our work and keeping up to date with it as it is important that you always have images to hand to show prospect customers and press interests. This also makes it easier for the press and they are more likely to give you more coverage.

Daniel Heath for Heals

He also told us the importance of getting your name out there, and the fact that every project may not be lucrative but they can always lead to more work which is always a bonus. Also about the production of 'gateway products' such as cushions. If someone buys one of your cushions they are more likely to buy a mirror to match or the wallpaper that is also part of that collection.

Daniel Heath for Retrouvius

Freelance design has never crossed my mind however the idea of a more 'organic journey' after university rather than working for someone sounds amazing. Being able to design for yourself without restriction and controlling which jobs you do and do not do. However the most important advice I feel he gave us was BE PROACTIVE, NOT REACTIVE.

Karen Nicol

Today our guest lecturer was Karen Nicol, she is a Textile designer who is an embellisher. She was really enthusiastic and had done a lot of work, she probably had the most work between all the freelancers we had had in to speak to us. I was quite inspired by her as her work was really interesting and unique, and she has worked with a lot of fashion labels such as Givenchy, Chanel, John Rocha, Julian McDonald, Matthew Williamson, Chloe and Marc Jacobs. She really went into the nitty gritty about working for these people. Saying she could have only 6 hours to make something that would be shown the next day. She kept her design simple so that they could be made quickly. Also her price needed to be kept down, if something was embellished for £150 it would immediately be sold for £420!!! Also she told us how she gets a lot of inspiration from dictionary definitions which is quite interesting.

Angela Davies Lecture

Although Angela's work does not relate to that of my own I still wanted to attend the lecture as it is good to here how other practitioners have developed their practice into a career. Angela focus' on sculptural textiles and sensory installation based work. One thing that she said did interest me, it was that when she was studying for her degree ten years ago, she did not have the technology she wanted or needed to fulfil her vision. This is quite interesting as I have been researching into new technologies that will be released in the next 2-4 years as it related to my trend book idea.

Alice Kettle

The Transformative Power of Thread

Today we had a guest lecturer, Textiles Practitioner Alice Kettle. Alice specialises in embroidery which is not something I am overly keen on personally so I felt that the lecture was not very relevant to myself. However she did speak a lot about getting commissions and being a freelancer so it did give me an insight into a possible career path I could take in the future.

Alice takes inspiration from stories that she feels relate to her life somehow or that have thread involved within them. I find her way of finding inspiration quite interesting as I have not heard of anything like that before. Her commissions are on rather large scales such as 16 metre embroidered images. Something I did find interesting in the lecture was when she collaborated with Pushpa Kumari and they began to draw by using a single thread dipped in ink to create line. I may try to use this technique to experiment more and to see what effects I could get with this technique.

Andrew Brooks, Photographer

Today we had a lecture with Andrew Brooks, who is a well established photographer who is originally from Manchester. He takes a lot of his photographs in and around Manchester, which immediately related to Unit X. Personally I was hoping for more of a fashion based photographer as that relates more to what my group are doing, however I still took the time to appreciate his work. I particularly enjoyed his 'Hidden Manchester' images in which he had teamed up with producer and curator Andy Brydon. This collaboration works well as Brydon does the research and writing and Brooks does the recording and photography. This is would have been quite similar to our project if our film students had turned up.

What interested me most about his work is that he said it can take him unto a month to create one shot from around 20/30 shots. He puts all of these images together on photoshop, these images can come from anywhere but he always has his final shot in mind. Andrew also adds himself into each one of his shots where possible. Although I feel his work has not related very well to what I am doing I still appreciated his work and learnt a lot about photography.

Zero-Waste Pattern Cutting - Fiona Mills

Today we had quite an interesting lecture about sustainable fashion. Basically the concept of zero waste fashion is to use the full yield of the fabric provided and to not let anything hit the cutting room floor.

There is at least 15-20% fabric waste within fashion construction, this wasted fabric goes into landfills, does not breakdown and therefore becomes toxic to the environment. I did not know this and it came as quite a shock. The yield of a fabric in a lay plan is obviously very important to companies in the lower market, who want to get more garments made from their fabric as possible. Fiona showed us many different researchers who had looked into zero waste fashion in a lot of depth.

Most of the designers that Fiona showed to us today were mainly researchers and did not actually sell any of their designs. Some of their designs I would personally not buy, however I love the concept and think it is extremely interesting. These designers entered a competition called YIELD. A particular design which I loved was by Timo Rissanen, who produced a jacket which just seems genius.

Hetain Patel

As part of our Contextualising Practice lectures we occasionally have guest lecturers, this week we had a man named Hetain Patel. He is a visual artist who graduated in 2003 and has been working on a variety of pieces of art ever since, mainly focusing on using photography and film. In the majority of his work that I showed us today, he was very involved in all of his pieces, they were all mainly based around himself and his heritage. His passion for experimentation and investigation was evident throughout the lecture, what interested me in his work was his use of recording the work. Many of his pieces were just photographed and documented, however some of his pieces were recorded. I feel this is something my group need to look into a bit more as our Film and Media studies students have yet to turn up to any of our group sessions.

Although these students have not turned up, I feel that we should not rule out recording our ways of working or even using a film as a final piece. It is definitely something I am willing to look into and venture into further, however, I will discuss this further with my group. 

On the other hand, I was not overly fond of Hetain's work. I was inspired by the use of texture within the photographic pieces, however the film did not interest me. Maybe because I did not understand a lot of it, and we were only shown short snippets.