Sock Mania

I met Steve from Burt Brothers Hosiery Ltd at my degree show, where I discussed my final collection and Steve told me a bit about Burt Brothers, at the beginning of August I had the opportunity to visit Burt Brothers Hosiery Ltd. and share my portfolio work with the them and look around the factory seeing how socks are manufactured from the design team all the way through to getting them on the back of the lorry to be distributed to stores including Primark, Accessorize and Tesco. 

Fascinated by the production of socks and feeling inspired I promised Steve I would work on some designs, giving me the opportunity to expand my CAD portfolio.  I must admit I love print and pattern and naturally I began to take inspiration from my final collection, after discussing this with Steve and seeing some of the socks produced at the factory, I decided it was time to produce more varied designs for my portfolio!

Having thoroughly enjoyed working on something a little different I really wanted to share with you some of the outcomes I have produced, I hope you like them, more of the designs can be found on my Behance profile and if you are a Pinterest addict like myself I have created a Sock Inspiration Board that can be found here

Features this month!

This month I have been very lucky to be featured in various forms of media, firstly if you haven't already and you have an iPhone or iPad download Knitsy magazine, it is free and everybody loves a freebie! I am very happy to say that my work has been featured in issue 3, page 20 alongside Wool and the Gang and some free patterns to get your mitts on too!  You can visit Knitsy's website by clicking here.

       

If you follow my Facebook page and Twitter you may have already heard that I had the privilege to be interviewed by Renae at Suzy Hausfrau in Australia, Suzy Hausfrau is a yarn store that stocks some amazing brands of yarn including my previous intern company MillaMia, alongside selling yarns and patterns Renae also has an amazing blog with some brilliant content including weekly podcasts!  I was approached by Renae and asked to be featured on her next podcast!  Listening to them religiously every week and enjoying each one with a cup of tea, naturally I snapped up the offer to talk with Renae.  You can listen to the podcast here.

It really is an honour to have such great feedback about my work and I am so happy to also announce that I have been selected as a finalist for the Knitted Textile Award and will be exhibiting my work at The Knitting and Stitching Show, Alexandrea Palace and in Harrogate this year! Follow my Facebook and Twitter account for regular updates and links 

This month you can also find me featured:

Design Juices

Pattern Pulp

A Little Insight

I felt that as today I received some excellent feedback on some fashion designs recently uploaded on to the website, that it was only right to publish a post about them!

Towards the end of my FMP, I started to think of ways to expand my collection and broaden the range a little.  I decided to look at how they could be adapted to fit within a fashion context.  If you follow me on Pinterest you will see that I am an utter addict and love pinning, all of the images you see here are inspirational images found on Pinterest and all of the credits and origins can be found there.

I have used similar colour palettes to the cushions in my graduate collection and have taken elements of the designs and adjusted the composition of shapes to work for the different products. 

Here we have some scarves under the Soft Accessory range, elements of these designs include a garter stitch border in a contrasting colour to the main fabric, along with some Swiss darned shapes (made just like my cushions) Alternatively the design could be knitted using intarsia, and Swiss darned shapes could be added in later for extra texture.  

I have two main colour palettes in my graduate collection I like to call one the Midnight Range (The one above) and the one below the Storm Range (Reference to the main yarns used as a base in my collection) this helps me when naming swatch groups in Photoshop and Illustrator and also helps me to name files and such.  The scarf design below again is intended to have a garter stitch border with the design either stitched on using Swiss darning or knitted in using intarsia.

To add something different to the collection, I thought it would be nice to design some items that aren't aren't intended for knitwear, although I could adapt these for knitwear, a few people have said how nice my designs would be as a jumper!  These were designed with the idea they would be digitally printed onto similar fabric you see in the first design board (image on the right).

So there we have it, a little more insight into some of the ideas that have come about that could potentially be developed further and sit next to my interior collection.  I have actually started on sampling some scarfs, however, they are quite different to the ones you see here.  

I do hope you have enjoyed reading about my design thoughts and processes.

(C) Louisa Crompton 2013

These designs belong to Louisa Crompton and should not be reproduced, re-published or used in anyway without the designers full written consent.

A Fresh Eye

So after four years of hard work, I am finally graduating on Monday!  As my work has moved on so much since starting university I thought it would be interesting to sort through some of my older work.

For those of you that have seen/know my work and in particular my final collection, you may not believe that what I discovered in the packed up boxes is actually something I produced!  I thought I would find myself throwing the majority of it away but actually going back to it, with a new eye has been quite inspiring.

A project exploring texture and pattern in nature.

An embroidery project exploring mark making.

A project exploring pattern and texture in nature with a particular focus on fugi.

I will be, over the course of the next couple of weeks, revisiting some of my older work and compiling new boards for my portfolio, for the time being though, I thought I would share some of what I discovered!

New Designers London 2013

So, I thought this would be a brilliant time to start blogging, at the beginning of my adventure!!

After completing my degree Ba(Hons) Textile Crafts specialising in knitted textiles, I was very pleased to discover that I had been selected to exhibit my final collection at New Designers in London.  New Designers shows over 3,500 talented, newly graduated designers from the Uk's leading universities.

The university shortlisted sixteen students including myself to exhibit our final collections and present ourselves as designers to industry contacts and members of the public.  Set up day involved a lot of re-arranging and decision making.  My work was originally going to be displayed against the wall, however after some discussions it was decided that my work would be placed in the middle of the space alongside the work of the very talented Rosie Preston (rugs) and Deborah Scott (glass).

During my time at New Designers I met some very interesting and exciting contacts including the UK Hand Knitting Association, Knitting Magazine and Helen Hunter from Colourful Beautiful Things.  It was fantastic to talk about my work to new faces and discover who was excited by my collection and the questions they had to ask.

I must admit the days were very long and I went through ALOT of Starbucks, which is situated very conveniently around the corner from the Business Design Centre!

The preview evening was one of my favourite moments of the week as Katarina from MillaMia and their lovely intern Yumiko came to visit myself and the final collection.  During my placement year I worked as a design intern for MillaMia and had the most amazing experience, so it was absolutely wonderful to see them and discuss my final collection and have a quick catch up!

Every year New Designers arrange a series of talks from various companies such as starting your own business, how to approach the press with your work, copyright etc...  I was very lucky to have the opportunity to attend a few talks over the week, including ones by Artsthread, Selvedge, ACID and Trend Bible, these talks were both informative and inspiring!

Since taking part in New Designers I have gained quite a bit of exposure and have been approached by several contacts, with lots of exciting things on the horizon!  Please visit regularly for more updates!

Please visit the New Designers Facebook Page for more photos and information.