It's...the Tree Towel!

Tree Towel in two-tone green

Tree Towel in chocolate brown & pink

OK, so my new design, The Tree Towel, is ready, yay! It is inspired by my recent travels in Sweden, can you tell? Sometimes new things seem to take forever to get from idea to object...in fact I got so impatient this time that I've already got another design figured out, all before this one was even released. But more about that later.

As I was so excited about The Tree Towel, I created a little flyer for it -

And of course, the towel's available in my Etsy shop now, in two colourways - two-tone green and chocolate brown and pink.Speaking of fliers, if you buy any of my tea towels or fabric goods, you'll also get a cute little sheet explaining more about the fabric - linen or hemp/organic cotton. For example, did you know that linen absorbs 20% or more of its weight in water and is bacteria resistant & can’t provoke allergies? Or that the hemp plant grows rapidly, requires only a modest amount of water and needs no pesticides, herbicides or fungicides? Well you do now :)

Happy Friday.

Trees

Have been doing some test prints for my new tea towel design, 'Trees'. It's a fun way to spend a chilly Friday.

London: Clerkenwell Design Week 2010

Another little story from my recent travelling adventure...

At the tail end of our holiday, while back in London, I literally stumbled upon Clerkenwell Design Week (it was three days, actually, on 25-27 May), which in the words of its creators is a "three-day annual festival celebrating design’s creative richness, its social impact and its power for change."

I remembered Clerkenwell as an interesting area that I'd briefly visited years ago, and one that seemed worthy of further investigation. And I felt kind of lucky that I'd randomly chosen the first day of the festival as the day I'd have a look around the area, as I had not heard about the festival before landing amongst it.

The first thing I saw was a small designy-crafty market (below), perfect start! Opposite it, some large and colourfully decorated lamps which looked great against London's blue spring skies.


Not far down the road was what seemed to be the festival hub, the Farmiloe Building, an old Victorian warehouse filled with displays of design objects/furniture/furnishings and more. One of my favourites was an accordian-style chair called the Flexible Love Recycled Paper Chair (below) - it stretches out to an impressive length and supports the weight of 16 people, apparently, even though it's made of just cardboard and wood waste.



And the highlight of the festival for me was a discussion called 'Design Thinking - Thinking Design' featuring four design professionals including Kevin McCloud (from Grand Designs, which I love.) Seeing the man in the flesh, observing his articulate manner and hearing his insightful ideas and his wholistic and ecologically responsible approach to design was refreshing and insightful.

And back to the here and now... The State of Design festival starts on Wednesday and runs through until 25 July. I'm looking forward to it, a taste of design that's Melbourne style.

Craziness

Yep, two posts in one day,when I barely fit in one per week usually.




These are some random shots of things from this morning - pears (so beautiful) and a drawing done while waiting for lunch.

And here is a sneak-peak of a new tea towel design I'm working on. Not sure about the colours yet, but I do love leaves.

The 'T' Towel

What's that you see? Well, that would be my new tea towel design, which is finally ready. Woot! Appropriately, it's called the 'T Towel'.

It's inspired by - not surprisingly - the letter T, and features my hand-drawn renderings of various Ts, including Garamond, Hoefler, Kevlar, Mrs Eaves and Caslon. At the moment it comes in black on crisp, white linen and will be in the shop soon.

Two-colour Nectarine

Looking at the cut nectarine of the previous post made me think of hearts, and with Valentine's Day coming up I thought about turning that into some sort of heart (not that I condone the overly syrupy-ness of V's D). As with many ideas that seem great at the time, that was hard to do, but instead it has morphed into an abstract two-colour pattern. Can you tell I'm really into simple graphics, often with no more than two colours?


I may also have gotten some round-about inspiration from one of the books that arrived for me in the post today (thanks to an Amazon voucher from my lovely sister). So much fun is ahead of me.