Jewellery work at Cow Vintage, Birmingham

My fabric jewellery and accessory work has been featured in a catwalk show at Cow Vintage, Birmingham, alongside several trends styled from the store's stock of vintage and retro fashion. My work is also featured in the shop window displays and are used to accessorize the mannequins.

Fabric Accessories - COW Fashion Show

A few of us students from the MA fashion course at BIAD are teaming up with COW vintage to put on a fashion show in March. I'm in the process of creating a collection of fabric accessories that explore the use of re-cycling and eco-fashion. All of these pieces were made using old clothes, scrap fabrics and various used 'tit-bits' such as ribbons, buttons, beads, etc.

Stitched Portrait Quilt - Yay I've finally finished it!!!

Finally, I have finished my stitched portrait quilt!!! This was first hand-sewn on an A4 sized piece of cotton, scanned in and digitally printed on to cotton at 1 metre in length. I then quilted a few of the black lines to give it definition, and quilted the surrounding area with random stitch work.

Reversible Quilt - one side

I've been working on the stitched portrait wall quilt, and have chosen to make it a double sided / reversible quilt, so that it can be hung either side. I wanted to make this quite quickly due to time restrictions, so chose to machine quilt the majority of this particular side of the quilt. I used some bought floral fabric with a layer of shimmer net over the top, and quilted using linear and random stitching. I hand appliqued three circles on the top and hand quilted around the circles. I'll be working on the actual stitched portrait side very soon and adding it to this quilt.

This image shows the stitched portrait being digitally printed. I chose to print it on to cotton poplin as I find it the best fabric to quilt, plus it prints evenly and well. The piece measures 1 metre in length. At some point soon i'll get round to quilting in to the print, probably using a mix of hand and machine quilting.

Stitched Self Portrait

I have been working on a hand-stitched self portrait using threads and stitch to create sketch / illustration lines. The stitched piece was completed at A4 in size and has been scanned in to the computer. I found it interesting how well the scan picked up the stitches and plan on digitally printing this on to fabric at around 1 metre in length. This will then be quilted. Its a quick way of creating a larger scaled piece - as the large fabric print will have all the qualities of hand-embroidery but without the painstaking time and effort (as an A4 piece only takes a few hours). This idea can be marketed and sold as commissioned piece - not just portraits, but pet portraits and landscapes, even still lives and other illustrations can be done this way.

Design for illustrated Log Cabin Quilt

I've been working on ideas to create a log-cabin quilt (which is something I've been thinking about for ages now). Finally, I have come up with this design, which is actually 'fake' patchwork, as the log-cabin patchwork is illustrated as appose to physically pieced. I have created this using digital printing on cotton, at 2 metres in length. My intentions are then to quilt all of the illustration lines, creating a fake patchwork wholecloth quilt. This picture shows my work-in-progress.