The past 6 weeks have been full of contrasts, going from extremely busy work filled days to very empty days due to recovering from illness. The busy days are always fun, if a little hectic and I’ll admit that whilst I’ve been ill, I have got a little bored, but it’s been nice to have a good rest and recuperate.
In amongst all of this me and Owen have been trying to make a plan come together and unfortunately it hasn’t, but we won’t be deterred or dragged down as it’s now just something we’re more determined to work towards. It involved moving studios to Nottinghamshire and we found the most perfect and wonderful studio, 4x our current size to fit in a nice large 20 metre table. The only thing that needed to fall into place was getting funds together to extend my current 8.5m table to 20m. That was unfortunately a stretch too far though so we’ll just have to work a little harder to get there. The main worry is that in the meantime we are completely out of room in our current studio which means making the difficult decision to only release one collection this year instead of two. Screens need storage and our current space is about to burst at the seams. After two years in our current space we’ve now outgrown it, we really didn’t think it would be so fast to be honest but life is full of little surprises!
As usual the studio days have been full of printing, my own fabrics and customer designs, but I’ve also been busy adding some new colours to the Geometrics range. There are 6 new colours to perfectly compliment the new Spring/Summer collection. In fact one of these has just been printed up for the sofa so watch out for the photos of that soon. I’ve also been working on a new fabric base cloth range I hope to be able to share with you soon.
All of the fabric books are finished and anyone who watches my Facebook or Instagram accounts will have spotted pictures of those. I’m offering these to my trade customers in two different sizes, so far the largest size has been the most popular.
These were really fun to design and make and have had a really positive reaction so far. It’s funny as they started off as a way to make a cheaper version than the usual professional sample books you can have made, as they proved just too expensive for me to have made. We decided to give it a go ourselves and the response has been great with customers saying they really stand out in amongst the usual books so all the effort was worth it.
I’m still not back to work full time but the next few weeks will be spent preparing for the Sheffield Print fair at the Millennium Gallery. I don’t do craft fairs anymore, just trade fairs, so it’s really nice to get back to my roots and do a local fair in Sheffield. The fact that this was a print fair was just too good an opportunity to miss. More on that next time :)
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