Beautiful Weeds

As a society, we are made to see weeds as the enemy, much like stains actually. They must be eradicated. You only have to walk into the garden centre to find hundreds of types of weed killer, all with horrible chemicals in them. Anything which you spray in the garden which says keep away from children and animals has to be bad. But whats so bad about a few weeds? This one I found in my garden (don't tell my mother, she would be horrified!) is like a nettle with tiny purple little flowers. Isn't it time that we stopped fighting these little things and started admiring them. You have to appreciate nature's resilience; no matter how much cement or chemicals we put in its path, these things always find a way.

Swiss chard

We have got quite a few Swiss chard plants growing in the garden and I had some of the baby leaves the other day in a salad. They were not only delicious but beautiful. This variety is bright lights, which have the bright orange and pink stems. This is the first yield from the garden this year, hopefully there will be much more to come.

Fendi S/S 2011

When browsing through the current issue of Elle magazine I can across a dress from the S/S collection for this year that had stain like patterns on it. Many of them appear burn like, and as you can see from the picture devore has been used to remove a layer of the cloth. I found them really interesting, not only because of my obsession with stains but also because i havent seen anything like it in fashion collections before.

Home Grown

Last year, my mum and I managed to successfully start a small vegetable patch in the garden. We had courgettes, tomatoes, beans and they all tasted fabulous, 1000 times better than that which you buy in the supermarkets.

Its fair to say that this effort had a lot to do with the BBC Two series broadcast last year called Edible Garden, where Alys Fowler (you can read about it and watch clips here) creates a vegetable garden in her small London garden. She also forages in the wild but this is something that I haven't quite mustered up the courage to undertake yet for fear or picking something poisonous. I love the idea of the Good Life, being self sufficient, living off the land and supporting local environments rather than global corporations.

We are expanding the vegetable bed this year, and it seems like other people are following suit. Whilst reading this months copy of Elle Decoration I saw 3 rooftops in London which had been adapted into roof gardens. Homegrown is having a revolution.

Keep your integrity

I sometimes find it very hard to stay true to myself, especially within an academic environment where you know that you are going to be marked on something. I think ultimately though, you have to go with what you believe in and not lose your integrity to please someone else. Someone who agrees with this is John C Jay in his 10 tips for young designers. Amen to this.

Work in Progress

A trace can be defined as a 'track or mark left behind; a sign of what has existed or occurred' (Oxford Dictionary, 1991: 341)

Through this work I have begun to explore the traces that are left behind over time and challenge society's perception of them. I have worked with stained textiles which have been donated to me, items which their owners no longer thought beautiful.

I have looked to nature for inspiration, particularly how over time surface in nature become consumed by fungus, lichen, moss and ivy. This to me is directly representational to that of a textile surface. Through day to day life they pick up stain and wear in certain areas. I have use my observations of nature as subject matter for my designs- printing images of moss over stained areas of cloth.

As I am concerned with the emotional durability of textiles I have given myself the challenge of making stained and worn textiles beautiful again by printing with natural staining substances such as blueberry, blackberry and turmeric. I wish to develop these processes further, testing in particular their permanence and how they fade over time.

Slow and steady

I started reading a book by Carl Honore called in praise of slow. It is a really interesting observation of how we live at ever increasing paces of life and he suggests that this can have detrimental effects on every aspect of our lives. He claims that we have lost the ability to do nothing and just contemplate. We can no longer just stare aimlessly out of train windows but have to busy ourselves with books, newspaper, phones. The irony of this is that I am currently sitting on a train writing this. However I am partial to staring out a window too, and sometimes I even get the stopping train for this exact reason; to stare out the window and be deep in thought. Honore emphasises that the Slow Movement isn't about doing nothing, its about finding balance in your life and not losing sight of the fact that some things require time to be taken over them.

This is exactly how I feel about my work. Its exploratory, requires a lot of research and thought and its not about producing hundreds of designs. Its about craft and value in textiles and making people slow down and think.
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