Sustainable Textiles short course at Chelsea

Clara Vuletich has designed a new short course at Chelsea called Sustainable Textiles, that runs over four days in October and February 2012. The course will consist of morning seminars on all the key sustainable textile design ideas followed by afternoon sessions of low impact printing and dyeing in the print room at Chelsea. This is a great chance to make some of our research available to a wider audience and the content of the course comes from Clara's experience delivering TED's Interconnected Design Thinking Workshops and her workshops with textile collective bricolage.

This is a great opportunity if you are a fashion/textile designer or craft maker wanting to find out the latest ideas and extend your own practice.

More information and to book here.

Eco Textiles in Tilburg

The work of several TED members is currently on show in reTHINK!: Eco Textiles at the Audax Textile Museum in Tilburg, Holland.

The show is an overview of the lifecycle of textile production from a sustainability point of view and includes the work of independent designers as well as commercial textile companies from the Netherlands.

Several of us showed pieces that were made during the Ever & Again project, or work that was developed after, in response to all the ideas and new thinking the project generated.

Becky Earley is showing one of her upcycled polyester Top 100 shirts, Mel Bowles is showing her Wallpaper Dress, Clara Vuletich is showing her Love & Thrift coat and Gary Page is showing two items from his wonderful 1-2-5 Collection of dresses.

Kate Goldsworthy, who is also showing a new garment made using laser technology to re-invigorate polyester, is also running a one day workshop on using laser technology for upcycling in January.

There is a good review of the show in Dutch site Design.nl.

TED Postcard from Melbourne

The talk I gave on our Upcyling Textiles project in Melbourne was a success, with about 35 people joining us at the new Harvest Textiles workspace. The talk was the first event at the space, that will house their screen printing workshops, a gallery space and a retail shop. They have some grand plans to run artists-in-residence programmes and all sorts of talks and events, so watch their space!

I introduced the audience to the work of all the TED members and the outcomes from the Ever & Again project. There were some interesting questions from the floor, including the question we get asked the most about the project - 'Are all these great ideas actually commercially viable?'.

The next talk will be to staff and students at RMIT University textile department on Tuesday.

TED postcard from Sydney

For the workshop I ran yesterday at University of Technology Sydney (UTS), the students made their own small patchwork sample, using fabric scraps. Taking a few basic quilting shapes as templates, we explored the idea of zero-waste cutting and hand-stitching. Several students had never used a needle and thread, so we worked slowly and quietly. At the end all of the pieces were brought together to make one whole 'quilt' which we photographed, and will then digitise and play around with using CAD tools.

I also presented a talk on 'Digital Craft' exploring the work of 'hybrid designers' such as weaver Ismini Samandiou and my work of 'digital quilting' called Fragments.

The students are involved in a project called 'Waste in the City' run by Marie O'Mahony. They have been put in groups and have been assigned an area of the city, and each group has been mapping the waste of that area, to identify any potential design interventions, using the local waste stream. The groups consist of students from a range of design disciplines, including visual communication and textile/fashion design, so the range of solutions should be interesting, and from the few ideas I heard, will mainly focusing of designing services around waste re-use.

TED Member Clara Vuletich is off to Australia next week and will be giving some lectures and a few workshops at various places in Sydney and Melbourne.

Clara will be running a workshop on 'Digital Craft' techniques to the textile/fashion students at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) on Tuesday 12th October, and then a lecture on the sustainable fashion communities in London, on Wednesday 13th October. This is part of their programme 'Waste in the City', run by Prof. Marie O'Mahony.

Then to Melbourne, and Clara will be giving a lecture on the Upcycling Textiles project at Harvest Textiles and a one day workshop on screen-printed printed wallpaper.

Finally, Clara will head to RMIT and present the TED work to the textiles department staff on Tuesday 19th October.

Clara will be sending regular blog updates of her Australian adventures.

The work of several TED Members including Becky Earley, Melanie Bowles and Clara Vuletich is to be included in an exhibition called reTHINK! at the Audax Textile Museum in Tilberg, Holland.

The exhibition will be exploring the lifecycle of textiles from a sustainability perspective and will include examples from fashion, interior and product design. other designers being showcased include Christien Meindertsma, Atelier NL, Suzanne Lee and Kate Goldsworthy.

Becky Earley will be making a new piece of work based on her Top 100 series over the summer so watch this space!

Designer-In-Residence Exhibition Luanch

How can digital textile print be used to enhance and celebrate old heirloom fabric pieces?

Can a 'digital craft' process, using sustainable base cloths, help to reinvent the traditions of quilting and patchwork?

These are some of the questions Clara Vuletich has been exploring as part of a 'designer-in-residence' scheme in the digital print department here at Chelsea. AA2A is a national 'artists in residence scheme', and it has been run for many years at Camberwell College, but this is the first time it has been run within the textile department at Chelsea, with designers!

At TED, we were the first group of designers to digitally print onto sustainable base cloths for the Ever & Again work in 2007, and Clara has continued to use these fabrics to experiment with.

All her processes and samples will be on show as a giant 'sampler', at Camberwell Space, Camberwell College of Art, from next Wednesday July 7th. Read more about the process on her blog Love & Thrift.

Several TED members were at the Slow Textiles Conference at Stroud last weekend. Emma Neuberg, Clara Vuletich and Becky Earley all gave presentations on their interpretation of Slow Textiles.

Emma Neuberg's presentation was first and was titled 'Why Slow, Why Now?'. She talked of her personal motivations for setting up the Slow Textiles Group (STG) which included her frustration at trying to find teaching/research work in universities and colleges that are prepared to consider a broader notion of design that includes the psychological, cultural, and environmental aspects. She then went on to explain the cultural and material reasons for setting up the group including the fact that by 2015, new legislation has meant that no textiles will be allowed to go into landfill in the UK. By teaching what she calls 'Extended Life Textile Techniques', people will gain new skills to use in their everyday lives and possibly contribute to a reduction in landfill.

She also highlighted the fact that there is a large, growing demographic of people (mainly women) over 50 years of age, who already have traditional textile skills and who are keen to connect with others. Emma's suggestion was that groups like the STG could be spaces for people to connect and potentially contribute to the re-use/upcycling of all the wasted textiles being generated.

Clara Vuletich discussed her emerging design practice as a 'slow design practitioner' and how there are three elements to her practice - producing hand printed wallpapers/textiles, researching and writing about sustainable textile design and working collaboratively with textile collective bricolage. Crucial to all of this design activity is reflection, and Clara emphasised how important this is to any type of 'slow' design activity.

Becky Earley then presented her Top 100 project, a slow fashion project over 10 years. Although she has presented this project to many audiences before, this time it was intertwined with her own personal life journey and how events in her personal life have been reflected and integrated into her design practice.

This was a major theme of the day - for any designer wanting to integrate sustainability and 'slow' principles into their design practice, that old saying is true - 'the personal is political'. How you live your life both outside of work and within it, carries the same values and qualities of environmental respect, balance, responsibility, openness and reflection.

For more information on 'Slow Design,' see Slowlab, Alistair Fuad-Luke's website SlowDesign or Emma Neuberg's Slow textiles Group.

Image: www.slowtextiles.org

textile collective 'pop up' project space

bricolage, the textile collective made up of five Chelsea graduates, including TED member Clara Vuletich, has moved in to their temporary project space for December and January. The group will be selling some of their hand made pieces and also running workshops in January.

Clara will also be running a workshop for MA students there on the new ways that textile designers are retailing and marketing their work.

The space is in Brixton Market and is part of a scheme to offer rent-free spaces to creative enterprises to regenerate the market.

Student Workshops in Hamburg

TED recently gave a presentation and led a design workshop for textile students at HAW college in Hamburg, as part of the Ever and Again: Rethinking Recycled Textiles research project, that Becky Earley has been leading.

Becky, Kate Goldsworthy and Clara Vuletich gave an evening presentation to students titled IMPACT: The Lifecycle of Textiles and the following day a workshop which explored the design themes being explored in Ever & Again, including Upcycling, Ethical Production, Short/Long life, Systems and Services Design and New Technologies.

Students worked towards developing an idea for a 'real-world 'concept, or new business model, which combined some or all of these design strategies.

Textile Collective launches

TED member Clara Vuletich is part of a textile collective called bricolage which launched last week at Tent London, part of the London Design Festival. bricolage specialises in contemporary bespoke textiles products for interiors and their expertise covers a range of traditional and innovative textile skills including screen printed wallpapers and textiles; hand and machine knit; crochet and upcycled quilting.

The collective has been formed by five textile graduates from Chelsea, whose creative 'make-do' attitude has inspired them to join together to create unique and considerate textiles.

They are also passionate about passing on their textile skill and knowledge and are developing a series of 'pop-up' workshops.

Conversations on (a) Slow Craft

The TED team recently took part in a small research project devised by Becky Earley, to coincide with the Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution exhibition which is opening at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery in October.

The idea behind Conversations on (a) Slow Craft was to take a group of textile designers and send them on a barge trip along a canal, while they discussed Slow and what it means to them and their practice as textile designers. The TED group were also joined by wallpaper designer Linda Florence, furniture maker David Gates and the whole conversation was audio recorded by artist Russell Martin.

The group were then led through a workshop in Japanese Sashiko embroidery by Emma Neuberg, which is part of her Extended Life textile workshop series.

The idea is for the format to be repeated at the different cities where the Taking Time exhibit tours to. A group of jewellers may all travel together on a horse and cart and talk about Slow or a group of ceramicists on bikes.

The audio recordings and transcriptions of the conversation will be available soon. In the meantime, there are some previous audio recordings of conversations between artists about Slow on the Taking Time website.

The value of craft and the Slow movement

TED Research Assistant Clara Vuletich has been asked to contribute to an ongoing blog discussion about the value of craft and the Slow movement called Making a Slow Revolution, organised by Craftspace.

Originally focused around the issues of food and food production, the Slow movement has gradually come to represent a whole way of living which is a reaction to the fast-paced, disconnected world we live in. It's core values are a respect for tradition and an understanding of the value of where and how an object is made.

These are values which are shared by craft and the blog discussion hopes to start a conversation about these issues.

Craftspace are working towards a national touring exhibition on these themes for 2009.