I Studied Textile Design at the Glasgow School of Art, specialising in knitwear after my first year. While some Textiles and Fashion Design students pass there designs onto manufacturers to produce, GSA placed alot of emphasis on us being highly trained at the manual production aspect of out specialisms as well as the design process. Initially we were trained to machine knit on domestic Brother machines; the chunkier effect they produce means you can see the stitches really clearly and get a good grasp of all the different techniques. I was always desperate to get onto the more fiddly intricate stuff, but starting out like this really helped me learn the basic principles of how to manipulate stitches and achieve effects that could be applied when we moved onto using the lovely fine industrial machines later on.
A couple of photos of very early work…!
- Very first garment! 2nd year
In my4th year cardigan collection, I really developed my love for interesting colour combinations, fine weighted yarns and the use of techniques like inlay and chevrons to achieve the patterns and proportions that I love so much. After graduation, we headed off to the New Designers exhibition which takes place in the business design centre in London every summer. It was an amazing place to spend the week, though after spending four years in a class of less than 30 people it was a bit mind boggling to see so much talent in one place and I think we all shared the feeling of being very small fish in a very big pond…!
- New Designers
- Team Art School <3
After a couple of wee trips to recover from the pandemonium of degree show preparation and collect lots of lovely new source material to get going with, I headed back to Glasgow. With my lovely machine now set up I was really keen to keep developing ideas and push myself towards new exciting designs that I hadn’t had the chance to experiment further with…
- Dreaming in Florence….!