New Era XC Cap Design Competition 2010

After finishing my BA degree and with the luxury of an entire summer of free time before diving into my next course the RCA, I decided to enter a competition to re-design New Era's iconic baseball cap. Probably not the most obvious thing for a knit designer to do, but it was a new challenge with a £10k prize up for grabs, so I said why not and gave it a go. Before embarking on building a sculptural piece of 'head art', I had been building a sketchbook of art deco inspired imagery that I thought could look quite cool if it was blown up onto jumpers, so it came in handy when I wanted so funky graphics for my hat.

For the cap, I had a concept of taking the shape of the peak and multiplying it around the hat in loads of different crazy prints. Hopefully so you would see little bits of everyone from different angles. I mocked this up in paper as so ---->

So, armed with a blank canvas cap, some super cool paint pens and markers courtesy of New Era, and electrical tape and a bit of knit, I created this work of art. A bit random and slightly unwearable, but it went into an exhibition which travelled around the globe and I now have a very posh coffee table book with all the entries (including mine) in. Oh and the nice people at creative review also featured it on their blog here.

A Post Apocalyptic World

Imagine a world, many years from now, where birds have lost the ability to fly and rely on Victorian flying contraptions in order to navigate the skies as they once did... 

then give a knitter some wool, metal springs, electrical wire and tell her to translate this concept into fabric...

and finally, turn the fabrics into a collection of knitted accessories. The results of which are a capelet / shoulder / neck piece, a decorative cuff and an arm-warmer.