Knitspiration.

My current favorite Knit designer- Craig Lawrence. Simply beautiful. 

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It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It don’t matter, anyhow
An’ it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If you don’t know by now
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I’ll be gone
You’re the reason I’m trav’lin’ on
Don’t think twice, it’s all right

It ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
That light I never knowed
An’ it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
I’m on the dark side of the road
Still I wish there was somethin’ you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talkin’ anyway
So don’t think twice, it’s all right

It ain’t no use in callin’ out my name, gal
Like you never did before
It ain’t no use in callin’ out my name, gal
I can’t hear you anymore
I’m a-thinkin’ and a-wond’rin’ all the way down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I’m told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don’t think twice, it’s all right

I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
But goodbye’s too good a word, gal
So I’ll just say fare thee well
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s all right

Bob Dylan. Im feeling sleepy and thoughtful. 

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a page from my sketchbook. 

Advertisement Task.

I have chosen a advertisement for the “Gold Label” for Viviane Westwood spring/summer campaign. 

The image shows the well known model Kate Moss in a gallery looking vacantly into the camera. 

The use of Kate Moss in this image is a massive connotation as she is the bad girl of the model world, as she and her rock star boyfriend were drug addicts, she has a kind of bad woman feel about her as a model. 

She is also the most well known model from Britain and she is popular as the model face of britain. 

This links well with Vivianne Westwood as a brand, as she created the brand and it became and is a very british fashion brand where using Kate only enforces this. 

Vivianne Westwood is also a very “bad chic” brand as her work was extremely popular during the punk days. 

The combination of these two elements create a mood for the image itself without even knowing what is going on in the image, you get the feeling that the advertisement is controversial. 

The photograph is taken in a art gallery, however it doesn't really look like a professional photograph. The image feels like it was taken on a disposable camera as the photograph isn't crystal clear and looks like it has a high contrast. Introducing the fact that the shoot was taken without the gallery even knowing which links in with the bad girl idea I spoke about before. 

Kate holds the clutch purse with ease like it is nothing to her. Like it could be anything. The image has a strong connection to sex and beauty, as Kate Moss is a supermodel and a icon within the fashion industry therefore immediately connects with the idea of beauty, sex, attraction and desire. 

She stands with the dress draped around her lifting up the side showing more leg, even that slight hint of leg oozes sex appeal. Just because it is Kate Moss.

Reflective Statement.

I think I have learnt a great deal in Unit 1, not only about how to create and set out a blog, but a lot about how I work and about London. 

Without Rough Guide I wouldn't of met friends and I wouldn’t of known Notting Hill like I do now. 

During the start of me writing my blog I found it abit of a “add on” and a “faff”. However I learnt throughout writing it and keeping it up to date that I actually enjoy writing it and I enjoy using it as a blank canvas for my thoughts and challenges within Textiles. 

I think that my blog will be highly useful when I am looking back on my first year and being reminded of inspiring things I did and looked at. 

My blog sums up my first term at Chelsea, with many inspiring images and pieces and I think it screams my excitement about the course. 

What I have learnt most and what I actually like most about my blog is the fact you can see me changing and my textiles changing throughout.

One of my weaknesses however I think is that I am quite weak when it comes to colour within my Textiles. By just looking at my technical block posts on my blog I have noticed that that is my weakness. I have also noticed that my blog is not that consistent, I have done all the tasks but all the posts seem clustered. If I could change one thing about my blog it would be to do a post every week. 

I think my strongest element of my blog is the fact that I have wrote a fair amount for the majority of my blog posts, and the fact that my blog is clearly exciting and I think I am quite truthful with my posts. 

I have really enjoying this Unit, I am proud of my work and I will and already have looked back through both my Rough Guide and Blog for reference and motivation. 

TED. Manifesto.

After one of our first lectures which informed us about the TED research centre which looks at the sustainability and enviromentally friendly fabrics and textiles.

We were asked to create a manifesto for our degrees which involves the TED guidelines and subjects.

I have many aims and aspirations from my degree that I want to accomplish from my time at Chelsea.

I want to have a secure and creative job within the Textile industry, ideally with fashion. 

I want to have a close connection with TEDs sixth rule of looking at historical and traditional techniques, I am highly interested in looking at tradition with textiles and taking advice from the great masters of the Textile industry. 

Sustainability and “Eco-friendly” textiles is highly important within TED, I want to try to use it more in my work. 

I want to use/buy less fabric to minimise my work waste. Therefore I will spend less money, and I will waste less.

From my degree I personally want fantastic opportunities, a Textile experience where I can grow and be inspired by, a challenge, and most importantly a experience that I will enjoy for three years and one that I will never forget. 

Phychogeography.

Knowing London alot more than I did in my first term I can relate to Phychogeography a lot more than I could. 

The term Psychogeography refers to the act of almost getting lost, it means to adventure somewhere by not using guidelines. By just using your head to navigate yourself when you are walking compared to actually learning your route, Psychogeography means to exlore your route instead.

I had an accidental adventure, I first went on the tube at pimlico, got off at green park like a normal trip home then I took the jubilee line to Westminster. I then decided to have a trip to Kensington of which I have never really explored. When I got off at Kensington High Street stop I just walked right up. Without knowing where I was it was quite therapeutic and calming. It was in the middle of the day therefore there wasn’t much hustle and bustle. 
I found myself at Kensington gardens. It was absolutely beautiful.

In London I think its very easy to build your way by signs and signals. 

However without the guidelines and restrictions I felt like I was in a completely different city walking around somewhere completely new. 

Knit. Technical Block 4.

Knit was the last of my technical blocks, I spent two weeks of handknitting but mostly machine knitting.

I was excited to try out the knit machines, when I first used one on the second day I found it really confusing and abit of a pain.

I thought getting to grips with it would be extremely difficult and I didn't feel completely safe with it. 

I was determined to understand the process involved with it so I spent most days all day on the machine working it out. 

I used my “pop-up” drawings as reference for my final colour scheme. 

After understanding the machines, you could make your knits more and more complex by using different methods such as the “hold” and the laddering technique. At first I think I found the techniques very faffy but once you have them under my belt its so much easier to work my knitting into the shape and feel I wanted. 

I became to be more experimental with my knit, with the use of the techniques it slowly became more and more fine arty. I liked that about this technical block it pushed me and challenged me. 

I liked the way that Knit made me look at my textiles in a completely different way, it opened my mind to the way knit works and how I can mold and shape textiles.

I believe that Knit challenged me which I didnt expect. It pushed me and taught me to have patience and to take time with textiles. 

The Foundling Museum.

The Foundling Museum.

The Foundling hospital museum is full with sculptures, paintings, furniture and books relating to the foundling children. 

The foundling children were the children lucky enough to get a place in a safe and secure environment after their mothers decided they couldn't look after them/ afford them anymore.

The main aspect of the Foundling exhibition that we looked at was the collection of the foundling tokens of which mothers would give their child before they would leave them forever. 

Looking at this collection of what felt like the hearts of the mothers, was extremely upsetting. Some tokens were even ale bottle tops as that was the single and only thing that the mothers had to give.

What was most shocking about this exhibition was that they had a interactive piece that was an exact copy of what the doctors/workers of the foundling hospital would use to determine if the child would be allowed to stay at the foundling. 

It had three balls and you twisted a handle to see if your child would be accepted. I did it and my child wasn’t accepted. Five of us did it, all of our children would not of been accepted. 

Tracy Emin’s work at the Foundling. 

Baudrillard- “The System of Collecting”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePv1X7RxU8c&list=PL6E5FC6AC1D573DC5

“My crazy obsession” videos on youtube, are all pretty extreme, I couldn’t stop looking though them. 

The one that made me really stop and watch in full was “Living Doll” of which was a short video showing a young girl Brenna who was in a beauty pageant, on stage Brenna was shown as a living doll dressed up in a massive pink dress, fake tanned, make up fresh and hair curled. Brenna is only about 4 years old, but it seems its a high priority that she wins the crown at the pageant. 

“It remains the case,nevertheless, that this absurd ticking off the desirable is fundamentally inhuman. Reduced to a set of anatomical parts, the woman becomes a pure object.”

This quote links perfectly to Brenna’s mother who has made Brenna into this Living Doll character. She has made a normal and sweet little girl believe she isnt a real human, Brenna believes she is a doll because of her mums making. She has reduced Brenna into a inhuman being, that she ins’t real or reality anymore. 

“What makes a collection transcend mere accumulation is not only the fact of its being culturally complex, but the fact of its incompleteness, the fact that it lacks something”

This particular quote suggests that Brenna herself or Brenna’s mother is creating this obsession, to complete a particular strand of their lives. For example Brenna’s mother could be creating this whole lifestyle for her daughter to complete her unresolved childhood. 

This particular obsession and collection of the pageant memorabilia is a fairly “normal” and regular thing to do but I find it still abit shocking to think that Brenna is only a small 4 year old who doesn’t know anything else bar this Living Doll lifestyle her mother has constructed for her.

Both quotes are taken from Baudrillard’s “The System of Collecting”. Pages 20 and 23.

Lecture Notes.

During my first term at Chelsea I have been attending lectures that include theory and tasks for my blog. I have summed up my notes from my lectures in this piece.

The set of lectures I went to were based around the theme of Collecting to form a relationship with our practical theme. 

There were many different threads of thought for the lectures, the pathology of collecting, collecting the exotic, obsessive collecting, what phycologists think of collecting and how we view certain collections.

The set of lectures we had made me open my eyes to not only my own collecting habit's but why we do it. My belief is that we do it to keep hold of certain memories or times when we believed we were happy or times we want to remember and cherish. 

One of the lectures concentrated on “Collecting the Exotic” of which looked into the paintings of the 1830’s. The sample of paintings we looked at all depicted women being sexual objects and very free and “easy” and the majority looked like they were foreign. However the women in britain at this time had strict rules to wear corsets and dresses that cover their arms and ankles. Therefore most of the paintings were sold to western men who were fascinated about these desirable creatures from strange and wonderful countries. The purpose of the paintings were to for full the mens fantasy of women being sexual beings. Their wives were purely there to create heirs.

La Grande Odalisque.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

The Turkish Bath

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Therefore the collection of the exotic in the 1830s was purely to create a fake fantasy world of what the Orient looks like. The paintings would also be excessively expensive therefore the paintings could also of been an investment or to show off how much money they have. 

This could be said that this “collecting of the exotic” could be going on nowadays, with Asian people visiting Europe to buy fashion pieces made by designers such as Louis Vuitton, Juicy Couture and Gucci. This shows that they want to be more Western. 

Another side of Collecting the Exotic is the “Human Zoo” or “Freak Shows” where Western people would pay money to see women/men from the orient. One image shows a muslim woman wearing a burka with her breasts reveled. I find that particular image hard to look at. her face looks in pain. 

There is a museum in Oxford names the Pitt Rivers Museum of which collects such artifacts and images from the time of the divide of the Orient and western country and sets all the artifacts together for example they would put all the fans together. People think that this is the only museum that does not create a divide between cultures. 

Another Lecture I had was the pathology of collecting. This lecture concentrated on the thought that collecting things is a way of categorizing things. This links to the example of a collection of My Little Pony collection where the person organized the objects by colour, location and name.

Its easy to categorize our own collections however what about when it comes to collections in a museum? How do they do it?

In the collecting world sometimes we find it embarrassing to admit out collecting, for example on youtube there was a man and wife who collected sex dolls and kept them in their house. Therefore youtbe is a way of showing your collections to the world without actively telling people about your addiction to those objects. 

I find looking through youtube at collections really insightful, some of them are admittedly extremely odd but its abit of an eye opener.  Therefore you could arguably say that I am collecting the exotic by looking at the youtube videos of people collecting odd things. 

Why do we collect things? 

Collecting objects that are personal to you is another way of organizing or documenting your own life. For example collecting train tickets. 

What should we collect? Why do we collect certain things? Could it be that we are trying to control our own memories? For example we don’t collect certain photographs because we want to forget them such as old photos of you and your ex boyfriend. 

We collect to forget: What isn’t in a collection is often as important as what is in the collection.

Freud’s view of the Human Mind.

In Frued’s “Iceberg” diagram of the mind, it has three stages Conscious, Preconscious and the Unconscious. 

The Conscious Level is part of the mind of which we are aware of, perceptions and thoughts.

The Preconscious level is the part of the mind that stores ordinary memory, where we collect knowledge and memories.

The unconscious level is the part of the mind that isn’t directly accessible to awareness, of which stores fears, violent motives, selfish needs, irrational wishes, shameful experiences and unacceptable sexual desires.

Looking at Frued’s diagram, it helps me understand the mind and helps me understand examples of behavior. For example a middle aged man had a deep desire to have sex with prostitutes however he knew it was wrong due to his conscious level. This resulted in whenever he had the desire to do so he would watch Blood Brothers to relax due to his preconscious level.

The Holocaust.

The Holocaust could be thought of as some sort of collection. In the way that the germans collected the Jews together and dressed them in the same striped clothes before they were sent to the concentration camps. 

There was an actual collection within the Holocaust also. Of which the Jewish people would have to give up their personal belongings which was catalogued and tagged by the german soldiers. The collection of objects were then sold on or recycled.  

The Holocaust is by far the most sick and disgusting collection of all history and time. 

The last lecture we had was “People Leave Traces”.

This lecture looked at the personal story of collecting and more importantly the memories that we hold.

We looked at how clothes were the most personal thing we own. They are intimate, they sit on our skin and some even mould to our shape. 

We don’t really have a personal connection with fashion or textile photography but I believe we have a small connection with the clothes themselves even if they are polished.

Fashion drawings however we understand and connect with better as it is how the designer actually believed it would sit on a person. 

Fashion images in a museum are harder to connect with., they are even more polished and they sit behind glass so they are literally untouchable. When the image is behind the glass it reenforces the fact that it is in icealation that we couldn’t look at it closely if we tried, this compares to the images in fashion magazines where you can look at the image closely and study it in great detail. Museums such as the fashion section in the V+A have froze the fashion garment in time. It takes the use out of the actual dress and it becomes a object to study, not a object of desire.

The notes I have written up are from the lectures I thoroughly enjoyed or made me open my eyes. 

Collecting is a present thing in everyones day to day life it goes from where you stack your mugs, to standing on the tube to the extreme like collecting sex dolls. We all do it, its just how we do it that is interesting.

Colour Inspiration.

Josie Natori. Spring 2013 collection.

I never normally am drawn to colour until  I saw these two pieces by Natori. She uses colour in a delicate beautiful and fragile way. Im always scared of using bright and very present colours...maybe I am going to take inspiration from Josie Natori to not hide away from it. 

Inspiration.

Andrea Zuill. 

My favorite illustrator/fine artist. I find her work extremely beautiful, its harsh but yet sensitive.