Saturday, October 30, 2010

Rococo Shoes

 I have decided to make some rococo mules for my next shoe making project. They are a bit of a combination of french 1700s fashion and Native American headdresses.

 There is one with a ribbon and one with a cabochon, I think the ribbon is more trendy while the cabochon looks a bit too costumy. Here are some of my inspiration images.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Hat Challenge: The funky astronaut

This is an "artistic" shot of my newest hat challenge results. This is the funky astronaut, inspired by vintage illustrations of space men. Friends say to me "Where do you plan to wear that?", "You look like an odd robot," and "What!?" I think what they are really trying to tell me is that they like it.

It is the first of my designs that has been incredibly close to my original sketch, I will post that later when i retrieve my sketchbook from my studio.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Slippers

This should be labeled dipped shoe project 2.0 because I used the same process to make myself a pair of slippers. I used a beige-ish natural wool paired with a blue rubber sole. I like the way the colors turned out, but some are not too keen on them.

I would like to post more pictures, but for some reason the new upload system is not letting me...

.. maybe this will be resolved later.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

shoes!

I am far along in the process of making a pair of shoes. This week I finally got the confidence to try sewing my own pieces on the industrial machines in the fashion department. I am not great at sewing straight lines, but it got to be too hard to explain my pattern to the professor and sewing for me was taking up a lot of her time. All pieces have to be sewn with a 1/16" seam, so I was a bit nervous about the precision in combination with the high speed of the machines. It turned out that the fashion machines are a lot easier to use than I was led to believe.

I do not want to show the patterns for the shoes quite yet, but I would like to share my color dilemma. I need to choose a color that goes well with periwinkle and gray, not that periwinkle and gray go well together. Here are my options:
Gold

Yellow

Green

Silver
Please help me out and leave some input, I will not reveal my opinion until there is some feedback.

Monday, October 4, 2010

This is hat is cool

This hat is cool.
That is all.

Friday, October 1, 2010

Why Design Now Conference

Today I went to an interesting conference at Lincoln Center. It was related to the design triennial exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt. All of the speakers were very interesting and relevent, it was really too much information to convey in only one post so I will try to discuss the issues that were brought up over the next few days.
There was a theme to the speakers. Every one of them was dedicated to the idea of design for the greater good, in other words, the panelists were all selflessly dedicated to the needs of human kind. Nobody was speaking about their artistic vision, and the term "design," whether industrial, graphic, or interface, was used to describe a process of creative problem solving rather than aesthetics. In fact, there was a distinctive lack of pretension and ego. Solutions were judged by their actual effect, not just on research and styling.
The themes that stood out were the importance of "empathy," a term used to describe not only understanding the emotion of the client or user, but their lifestyle and culture. This was not just a buzzword or a trend, it was a fully implemented philosophy which helps keep the designer from designing irrelevant solutions.

More about this when I can organize my thoughts better...

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