Rainbow Pinata Cross Stitch Pattern

As you probably saw in Sunday's blog post, my newest craft addiction is cross stitch. I initially started is as part of my uni project, but I think I'm going to continue with it. It's been a much more relaxing way to stay occupied on long tube journeys than playing angry birds and pet rescue saga!

Besides a few little cacti, this Rainbow Pinata is the first proper cross stitch project I've done in years. It's inspired by my Mexican Project and the adorable Adventure Time pinata Manfried.

Here's the pattern for anyone wanting to stitch this!

Picture Catch Up #1

Over the past few weeks I've been frantically crafting and sewing ready for the start of term on Monday. This project is based on Mexico so I've been drawing inspiration from Mexican parties, plants, artists, food and crafts so I've been doing lots of colourful embroidery and applique as well as lots of illustration and pattern ideas.

Here's some pictures from my sketch book work, I'll be posting a pattern for my Pinata cross stitch later in the week.

Don't forget to enter my Kelsea Echo Giveaway for your chance to win a $40 gift card for her shop!

Desk of the Day - Origami Flowers

Today I'm working on some digital patterns and illustrations based on origami for my latest uni project. I think these patterns look a little geometric and crisp for the look I'm going for so I may have to find a way to re use them.

Nature Rebranded - The final shoe

Here are the pictures of my final shoe for my Nature Rebranded project. You can find the designs for this shoe here and more of my uni work here.

Nature Rebranded Designs

I thought it was about time I showed you this term's work. You can see more of my uni work here.

My shoe designs this term have been based around the idea of rebranding nature - taking a natural object and making it man made. This term has been really exciting. We got to make our first ever shoe!

As you can see my final shoe was heavily inspired by rock formations. The idea was to create a man made rock formation as the platform, but to cover it in one solid colour to contrast with the natural texture of the platform.

Here's the mood board and designs for my final shoe, I'll be posting pictures of the shoe next week.

Desk of the Day - 27/02/2014

I feel like I've been so absent from blogging lately! My uni schedule is a little be crazy due to deadlines next week. So I thought I'd share with you a little something I'm working on today.

This pattern is going to be printed onto some leather for the inside of my final shoe this term. I've gone for a rock/geometric theme for the shoe so I wanted the theme to continue on the inside.

Desk of the Day - 09/02/14 Making uni work as kawaii as possible

Today I'm working on my tech file. Along side our projects at uni we're supposed to create a file full of techniques and things we've learned during our classes. Right now I'm working on some pages introducing all the machines we use to make shoes and what they do. As you can guess, it gets a little boring just typing up notes so I couldn't resist making the machines into little kawaii monsters! They're not all as friendly as they look & can be dangerous, but they're pretty helpful when it comes to making shoes.

More of my uni projects // More Desk of the Day posts 

The Death of a Shoe

On my first day of uni we were all taken into a room full of shoes and asked to pick one to take apart. To my flatmate Ari's horror, I chose a sneaker made by the brand GUESS (she's a Guess addict and almost cried when she saw the corpse of what once was a Guess shoe).

Taking the shoe apart was very eye opening, I discovered so many hidden parts that keep the shoe together, stable and comfortable.

Here's some pictures I took for my tech file. If you're squeamish about dismembered shoes then look away now.

You can see more of my uni work here.

Remake & Remodel - The final 3D prototype

You can find my previous Remake & Remodel project posts here.

Once I finished my bacteria inspired designs I then had to create a 3D prototype of part of my final design. I chose to create the bubble platform. This was a big challenge for me as I'm so used to working in 2D or just applying paint to a 3D surface. The final prototype is made of carved industrial foam, putty, foam spheres and spray paint. I now have a new appreciation for just how time consuming and hard work it would be to develop a professional three dimensional heel. I can't wait to learn new techniques to make objects like this though, hopefully I'll get to use the 3D printer next term!

I feel like I've learned a lot through this project, much of it is thanks to some amazing feedback sessions with my tutors and lots of bouncing ideas off my course mates. The areas I feel I could improve particularly are research and design development. After working for myself and blogging about my illustrations I'm so used to showing the final product and am too much of a perfectionist when developing initial designs. I realize I now need to use quick sketches to develop ideas and make my sketchbook research seem less rigid and for it to flow better and make sense.

You can see more of my uni work here, and more of my illustrations here.

Remake & Remodel - The final design ideas part 2

You can find part 1 of my designs here. After discarding my heel designs I decided to focus on sneakers as I think eventually I'd like to go into sneaker design (Hello Nike? I promise I'll treat you good, I won't leave you for Adidas like Kanye did!).

I explored different ideas for the sole, the stitching, laces, materials etc before I settled upon my final design. My final design ended up being the bubble platform, I then had to create a 3D prototype of an element of that particular design which will be in the next post!

You can see more of this project here, more of my uni work here, and more of my illustrations here.

 

Remake & Remodel - The inspiration

Most design subjects at uni require you to show your ideas through colour boards and mood boards. Here are the inspiration boards for my Remake & Remodel project. As you can see, my main inspiration came from bacteria and the simplistic 3D shapes of DNA. I wanted to combine the bright, business of the bacteria with simple and futuristic shapes.

You can see more of my uni work here.

Remake & Remodel - The final design ideas part 1

I feel like I've been pretty absent from blogging recently, but my last deadline is tomorrow so normal blogging will commence shortly!

In the mean time here's a sneak peak of part of my design development for the Remake & Remodel project. I discarded this shoe design as I wanted to work on a sneaker style shoe in the end.

You can see more of my uni work here, and more of my illustrations here.

Remake & Remodel - Thumbnail Designs

For my Remake Remodel project I did two A3 sheets of tiny designs based on DNA & bacteria. The next stage after this is to take 6 designs and develop them, then choose the final design from those.

You can view more of my uni work here and more of this project here.

Here are my initial thumbnail designs:

A London Catch Up

I've been living in London over two months now. I'm lucky enough to have found a group of fun, crazy and totally lovable people to live with and I'm loving it here. My first term at uni has been both one of the most challenging and one of the most fun times of my life, I feel like I'm already learning and progressing so much.
London has always been one of my favorite places on earth, it still feels really surreal to be living here and I'm so grateful I get to study in this beautiful, energetic city.

I realize I still haven't shared much of my life in London with you, so here are a few photos from the past few weeks of my exploration of London and a few bits of my uni work (if you follow me on instagram you'll probably have seen these already).

Remake & Remodel - Bacteria Pattern

Leading on from my post a few days ago, after a couple of days catching up on crazy dog and fat cat cuddles, I'm feeling up to going into more detail on my current project!

This project is called Remake & Remodel. Our brief is to be inspired by a shoe we were given to deconstruct (pictures of this to come!). Deconstructing my shoe got me thinking about what goes into a shoe and what isn't shown. So, inspired by designers that use functioning parts as design features, I started thinking about what is inside us that dosn't show. I ended up looking into DNA, viruses and bacteria, all of which have some fabulous visuals to inspire a project.

Pattern has been a large part of the shoe designs I've been working on for this project, I wanted to add some fun and bright PonyChops style to these shoes. Here's a pattern I've designed and decided on to be in my final shoe design. I'm really pleased with how it's turned out, and think it works well with the style of shoe I've picked.

Remake & Remodel - finally a catch up!

Hey guys, long time no speak! I'm sorry last week was a little empty on the blog. This term at uni is whizzing past and I feel like I haven't even shared any of it with you yet! I'm hoping to organize my time a little better this next couple of weeks so I can share some more work and London life with you.

This term I have two big projects, one named "Remake - Remodel". I'm not going to go into any crazy detail with it yet as I've been sat at a computer for 12 hours today! So here's some dodecahedron patterns that I made for the project. Hopefully I'll get to explain the project to you some more in some future posts, but for now I'm off home to sunny Preston! I can't wait to finally get some fat cat and crazy doggy cuddles! Can you believe I've been away from them almost 2 months now?