Summer School Exhibition

For the past two weeks, I've been teaching fashion & textile design to some very cool kids at summer school. Last night they had their graduation and exhibition to show off their work.

 The summer school was held at UTS for year 11 students from priority funded schools. I was amazed at the creativity and talent these kids showed across three areas of design - fashion, visual communication and industrial design. They spent two days learning about each of these disciplines before choosing one to concentrate on for a second project. 

The first project for fashion design was screen printing. The students designed paper stencils and printed on t-shirts and bags. It's a tricky technique to perfect but they picked it up very quickly.

Two awesome examples of making your mistakes work for you. When the girl doing the Patrick t-shirt forgot to put the whites of his eyes in, she painted on some sunglasses. When the text on the Mickey Mouse t-shirt bled, the designer grabbed a paintbrush and roughed it up to make it look more purposeful. I thought her t-shirt had a very 'street art' feel to it, with the black stencil and fluoro orange 'LOVE'.

The second project concentrated on transforming recycled junk into sculptural fashion pieces (it was all very Project Runway!). This dress was a tribute to obsolete technology, using cut up CDs, video tape and a necklace made from broken headphones.

 

Wrapping paper, laser-cutting offcuts, vinyl, and pink safety pins.

Top made from woven strips of garden tarpaulin and an inflatable cactus party decoration. Skirt made from paper, fake flowers and green cable ties.

The industrial design workshops revolved around making lamps, displayed here in front of visual communication's posters.

For their second project, industrial design worked as a group to turn the sample prints and sketches from all of the first three workshops into a beautiful mobile.

Christmas shopping reminder!

Christmas is less than two weeks away and if you're as disorganised as me, chances are you haven't done any Christmas shopping yet. To help you out, I'm having a bit of a Christmas sale.

When shopping in the Etsy store, enter the code YAYITSXMAS at the checkout for 20% off your entire order. That's better than my staff discount at work! That code can be used by anyone in the world right up until Boxing Day (EDIT 27/12/11: this code has now finished).

Also, for Australian customers ordering between now and Sunday 18th December, I'll post your orders by Express Post at no extra charge to make sure it gets to you as quickly as possible. I'll even giftwrap them if you want me to send them straight to the recipient.

Get shopping!

Terms & Conditions (doesn't that sound serious!): 
2. The Express Post offer is available only to Australian customers until midnight Sunday 18th December, AEST. I send all orders via Australia Post, from Sydney, on the next business day after receiving your order. Australia Post guarantees next business day delivery within the Express Post network. However, all those letters to Santa can clog up the postal system at this time of year so please use your own judgement to decide whether your order will get to you on time.
3. Santa is always nice to people who support small businesses!

Adventures in Machine Knitting, Part 1

 

I have recently acquired an old knitting machine with a LOT of accessories for a bargain price. Do I know anything about machine knitting? Not really. I used machine knitting in my graduate collection last year but I was lucky enough to be sponsored by a knitwear company that did it all for me on huge computerised machines. The process is a little bit different.

Luckily, the machine came with its original instruction book. So, last week, I laid out all the parts on my work table and started reading. I stuck post it notes on any parts that were identified in the book. I managed to thread the machine with yarn. I worked out how to cast on. I knitted three rows! Success!

Then the carriage got jammed. Now, the book says 'do not force the carriage'. So naturally, I forced the carriage. It moved! Then a tiny little unidentifiable bit of metal fell out of the machine. Oops.

I turned to The Google. Some lurking on the Ravelry forums told me that my machine is missing a rather essential part (a sponge bar, for those playing along at home). Turns out that this is the absolute first thing you should check the condition of when buying an older machine as they can deteriorate. Knitting without one causes death and destruction or something like that. Of course my trusty instruction book didn't tell me that because it was written thirty years ago for the proud owner of a brand new Empisal Knitmaster 260K. Thanks, book.

I found the part on eBay for just slightly less than the cost of the entire machine itself, and it is on its way to me from Hong Kong right now. As for that tiny little unidentifiable bit of metal, I eventually found where it belongs and put it back in. So while my knitting adventures have been stalled for now, I'm still feeling pretty good about it all. I'm hoping to have stripey scarves in the Etsy store by next winter (Australian winter, that is).

Stay tuned!

Transformation

Thought I'd share with you a video I made for the U@UTS Summer School that I'm teaching at. We had an orientation for it the other day and I made this video as an intro to the fashion workshops.
The first few clips are from the 2010 UTS Grad show, and the others are all related to the 'transformation' theme of the summer school. Enjoy!


Untitled from Ali Kenworthy on Vimeo.

Some of the clips used are:

ISSEY MIYAKE - Animation by Euphrates
Hussein Chalayan - Transformer Dress
Hussein Chalayan - Autum/Winter 2000
Animorfos
Viktor & Rolf

Shop update!

My online store now has all of the pretzel necklaces, bags, t-shirts and reversible skirts. Yay!

Now get shopping!

A fashion week rainbow

All images from style.com
Sass & Bide
Roland Mouret
 Mulberry
Paul SmithCacharel
Martin Grant
Viktor & Rolf
Norma Kamali
Nicole Farhi
Nanette LeporeMoschino Cheap and Chic
 Rebecca Minkoff
Monique Lhuillier
Milly

New store

Just a quick update to let you know that the old store is now closed - I have moved all of my bags over to my Etsy store which can be found here.

When I find the time and get a nice day, I need to photograph more products like the reversible skirts and printed t-shirts so that I can put them in the store!

I liked the layout of the old store (hosted by big cartel) but the monthly fees weren't worth it and Etsy has a great community and existing customer base, so it suits people like me who don't have time to always be promoting their store! The downside is that I can only set prices in US dollars - you can shop on Etsy in Australian dollars but this means that whenever the exchange rate changes, the prices change. There's not much I can do about that.

Today is rainy and horrible here, which is annoying after all the nice warm weather we've had. I'm going to make Cha Siu Pork for dinner which is that red coloured, sticky sweet chinese dish. I just marinated the pork and it smells really good!
What's the weather like where you are and what are you having for dinner tonight?

Things to look at on a Sunday night

The title says it all - this is just a random selection of photos, art, fashion and design that have caught my attention lately.

1960s London by Tripendicular

 Sterling & Noble clock by doe-c-doe on flickr

Amethyst by The Pairabirds

 Miu Miu in Dazed and Confused (via slow motion crawl)

Clementine by Ashley Goldberg

I don't know where this photo is from. It's cool though.

 

 Explore the Universe, via Etsydudes

 Awesome girl with a clock, via Tripendicular

Bend chairs (via Elle Decor)

 

Collaged map artwork by Matthew Cusick (via but does it float)

Krisatomic's map of London

Modern Retro clock by Stevo

Kasimir Melavich

Suprematism (Supremus No. 58)

1916 (via Hollywood Babylon)

 

New York by Bianca Gomez (via Grain Edit)

It was my birthday on Friday. I had a 60s party.

Our market stall

 

We had such a fun day at the markets on Saturday! It was great to be back at UTS and meeting so many lovely people on Open Day. We did pretty well for the day considering that not many people knew about the market, the alphabet rings were a best seller! 

I also had fun catching up with other students who had stalls and some of my teachers who dropped by. The market had a few stalls from fashion students, some from Industrial Design and lots of yummy food stalls. Oh, and I won a bag of popcorn for throwing a ball at a target so that was pretty exciting.

I'm currently moving my shop back to Etsy - I don't like their interface as much as bigcartel (which is what I'm using at the moment) but I do like that they have a solid customer base already there and there are lots of good opportunities to publicise your work. Anyway at the moment the bags are still at the old store (here) and the Etsy store has some Alphabet rings and pretzel necklaces. It's all still in transition mode though so I'll let you know when it's done!

Syb's stall - she's in fourth year

Project Menagerie - I love the idea of this. The first year students designed some motifs, set up some screens and have spent the last few weeks madly printing t-shirts to sell at the markets. Isn't that cool? I bought a t-shirt from them.

s.e.v by Sarah - a third year student & awesome model!

Some of Sarah's jewellery

This is the t-shirt I got from Project Menagerie!