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.

NEON

Many of you will know, I LOVE neon and I had slightly forgotten this until I started adding it into colour palettes I was making today. In celebration of my renewed relationship with fluorescence, I have decided to show you a sketchbook I did whilst on my foundation course. There was a lot of neon, more electrical components and some slightly questionable sportswear design ideas, but it's a fun and very playful, so put on your sunglasses, you're going to need them!

Bold and Bright Blocks and Lines

As I've now got the bit between my teeth to crack on with my final collection, my blog posts might become a little less frequent for the time being. My days will most likely to be spent within the creative confines of the RCA, but never fear, more colourful loveliness is always just around the corner...

This is a quick collection I started to design before the summer, inspired by the bold graphic paintings of Peter Halley. I've got the idea exactly in my mind about how to knit the fabrics for these garments so fingers crossed they will be available to buy one day in the future!

Peter Halley Artworks 

Peter Halley Artworks

Colours!

Draw draw draw

If anyone else studied their art foundation at Chelsea, (like myself) you will be aware that they are big on drawing. If I recall correctly my first few weeks there were spent continuously exploring ways of mark making and drawing different qualities of line. Whilst packing this weekend to travel back to London for the start of the new term (and desperately procrastinating the task in hand...), I had a flick through some of my old sketchbooks.

 This is a selection of pages from one of my early foundation projects. I had to make a 'miniature world' which was a collection of small electrical components stuck into a tiny chest of drawers. Yes those pesky components crop up a fair few times in my design work! Anyway from this still life I did lots of delicate little drawings on a variety of constructed and collaged papers which finally informed a number of print ideas. I was exploring mono-printing different textures, layered with cut out papers relating to my initial drawings. 

  I felt it to be an appropriate post as the concept I am currently working on is entitled 'the travelling line', and much of this imagery fits the idea nicely!