Mr X Stitch

Jamie Chalmers, more famously known as Mr X Stitch gave one of the funniest lectures I have ever been to today. He began by telling us the story of how he got into cross stitching, because he was bored on a plane ride!!!

He told us how he wasn't inspired by any of the commercially available cross stitch patterns so he started to develop his own patterns enabling him to cross stitch his favourite super heroes, turning the traditional craft into something fun and contemporary.

The Mr X Stitch blog was set up in 2008 and showcases hundreds of contemporary needlework artists with weekly updates by the ever expanding X stitch team.

Through the lecture Mr X Stitch introduced us to a range of artists from the blog which really opened my eyes to the innovative ways cross stitch can be used!

Throughout the lecture I started to make some links between this craft that is sometimes considered old fashioned but is actually at the front of many contemporary artists practice with the age theme of our project. I am hoping to incorporate some of the ideas shown in this lecture through my sketchbook.

These are some of the images I have been inspired by...

Severija

Rebecca Chew

Lauren Bowker and Blog Workshop

I had heard people whispering about how good the Lauren Bowker lecture was going to be, so I had high hopes going into the lecture theatre.. and I wasnt disappointed!

The lecture basically told her story of being a student at MMU, then her progression through to the Royal College and out into the working world, along with her experience of setting up her own buisness that eventually folded to make way for her new label.

She described her work as being based around a desire of ‘Making the invisible, visible’. In her recent work she uses thermal chromatic dyes, a technique that she first started developing and experimenting with whilst on the Textiles course at MMU. She now produces both fashion and installation pieces based around this technique using feathers and other materials.

   

 

 

 

But the thing that inspired me the most from Laurens lecture was her attitude towards her work and her sense of fun and adventure. She isnt afraid to invite the top designers in the country along to her events on the off chance that they might be free. She has worked in science and technology and practically has a degree in chemistry as a result of this, and yet she still produces these beautiful, creative sculptures that she then sets fire to without a second thought! To be so fearless and sure of your practice is a truly remarkable thing and I hope that one day I will have the same attitude as Lauren! 

 

 

After this incredible lecture I was feeling so uplifted and inspired, I headed off to my blogging workshop.. which sadly was not as good. I have a basic knowledge of blogging from my foundation course, but this workshop was about how to link your blog/twitter/facebook/pinterest/flickr/google+ etc all together so that they post simultaneously... I dont really understand how it does it but we were introduced to a platform called IFTTT that you can link things through. I havent tried it yet but hopefully I can link up my blog, pinterest and twitter as then I wont have to upload all my pins and posts and tweets seperately! Fingers crossed I can manage it!

 

 

Poster Workshop

Today we met our groups again up at Hilton House to present our research posters. We met in our individual sub groups first, and then had to do a 175 second presentation to the rest of the groups about our research and our ideas going forward in the project.

It was really interesting to see all the different ways each group had interpreted the 175 brief, and also highlighted which groups had the strongest sense of teamwork.

Within my sub group we all have very similar main themes now so have agreed over the easter holidays to keep expanding our individual research through sketchbooks and twitter updates, so that when we meet again after Easter we will be able to bring all this research together and start working as more of a collaborative.

The Trend Boutique

Today we had a lecture by Sally Denton the owner of "The Trend Boutique". I was excited about this lecture as I am really interested in trend prediction and wanted to understand more about the methods behind this. The Trend Boutique is an online resource, events management and trend consultancy company that works closely in collaboration with HE and FE establishments. 

The lecture opened with a quote by William Gibson "the future has already happened, it's just that it isn't very well distributed yet".  It then went on to explain the cycle of trends and the different categories of trends that come around with regards to fashion design. 

From this introduction to how trends are categorised, Sally then went on to explain "Trend Methodology" and the processes and thoughts behind trend prediction. For me this was the most interesting point of the lecture as I was fascinated to learn how new trends are formulated and then distributed via printed publications, trade shows or online resources such as The Trend Boutique. Sally explained the struggle of Research v Initiative when predicting the future trends and how they can have so many forms of influences ranging from politics and the environment to new artists and historical references. 

The second half of the lecture was then focused on the upcoming trends for 2014 and beyond. This really got me thinking about how I could incorporate some of these themes into my future projects and pushed me to research some of them further. 

I really enjoyed this lecture, it was so helpful to learn what went into trend prediction and made me think about expanding out my own research into these new avenues of inspiration. 

Group Meeting

Today we decided to have another group meeting to feedback on what we had been individually researching around our "AGE" theme. It was also an opportunity for us to meet the ninth member of our group Lee and get him up to speed with what we have done so far.
We have also set up a facebook group so that we can easily communicate and arrange our meetings and share ideas etc.

 

 

In my reserarch so far I have been looking into age from a very fashion based perspective. I have been looking into how to capture age through street style and how we can map changes of style and dress as a person changes. I found an amazing blog http://advancedstyle.blogspot.co.uk/ that documents the lives and everchanging style of a group of women in New York. I love their passion and love for clothing and how they still dress like they are going to the opera every day. I just hope I dress that well when I am their age!

 

 

 

 

Along side this fashion perspective I have also been looking to bring our project back into Manchester and have been looking into buildings built at the same time as the art school with a view to use these as the backdrop for our street style images and maybe used in a film context too.

 

 

 

 

After a discussion in our group we found that because thre are five fashion students, a lot of the ideas were very fashion orientated around street style and fashion photography. So we looked into ways of combining the textiles girls ideas on aging fabrics and dying techniques in with our ideas to create something that spanned across all of our interests including film and media. Laura had also found some locations of decaying buildings that you can explore around Manchester so we have agreed as a group to include this idea too. From this meeting we now have two main themes that everyone can focus their individual research on...

-The aging process and how this effects both people and buildings

-Ways of capturing and recording this (photography, film, drawing, street style etc)

 

Our next task is to create a poster to present to the other groups on Tuesday that reflects our research. 

Food Workshop

When I saw a "Food Workshop" on our timetables, I was both confused and intrigued as to how this would link into Unit X.  

When we arrived at the workshop this board greeted us...

 

 

 

From this information we realised that we had to make a sandwhich!! We were split into groups and each given a bag containing one ingredient for our group sandwich. We then pooled all these ingredients together and had to discuss which ingredients to include and also how to prepare them. I was very sceptical at first but then I found that the more we discussed and worked around different peoples tastes and cooking methods, it became clear that this was a very effective team work exercise in communication and testing our decision making within a group. In the end we decided to use all of our ingredients, and mix some together to make a dressing and a side salad.

 

 

 

 

After we had made our groups sandwich, we then had to cut it in half and trade sandwiches with the group next to us so we could try their combination of ingredients and share how we came to our group decisions. 

 

 

 

This workshop was set up by designer Constance Laisne and currator Laura Mansfield as a method of encouraging people to work together as part of a collective team, testing their individual and group decision making and how they work through problems that arise in groupwork situations. I actually really enjoyed the food workshop, and I got a free lunch so I was happy!

 

 



Brainstorming...

Today we met our sub groups within "Perform" and pitched all our facts on 175 to eachother. We met in Hilton House in the Northern Quarter which I wasnt thrilled about as I cant just roll out of bed ten minutes before my session like I can in the Art building. And I was even less thrilled when I got there as from the outside it looks like a deserted office block! But I recognised a few people milling around outside looking as confused as me so we all went inside.

I am in sub group "Perform 4" which consists of 5 fashion, 2 textiles in practice and 3 Film and Media students (although we only met two of them today).

Within our group we had a huge variety of different facts to share, some peoples overlapped which helped us to gage eachothers interests and got us all talking to eachother. The people in my group are all really nice and easy to talk to which will make the groupwork element of this unit much easier. We didnt spend too long sat in Hilton House as it is freezing and very dusty but we settled on a main theme which came from Lauras decoding of the numbers 175 and taking the correspending 1st, 7th and 5th letters of the alphabet which spell AGE. We made a mindmap based around our initial ideas of the theme and have agreed to go away and research how age can releate to our individual practice befor meeting up again to discuss as a group.

Welcome to Unit X...

Today was our initial meeting and briefing for our final project, UNIT X. All I knew going into the lecture theatre was that Unit X was a collaborative project across the various disciplins in the art school, so I had no idea what else to expect.

After being given all the usual mountains of paper stating what is expected of us and how we will be assessed I was suprised to find that we have been given so much freedom with this project in terms of documentation and outcome. The only requirement from everyone is a blog, the rest is totally up to us which is really exciting!

We were then split off into 4 main groups, each with a title that could maybe influence our projects... Revolt, Perform, Play and Record. I am in the Perform group, which is why I was given a blue bracelet.

The second meeting we all sat in our groups and were given a bit more insight into Unit X. Our starting theme is 175, as the Manchester School of Art is 175 years old this year. Our task for tomorrow is to "activate" these numbers and come up with three facts to share in our sub-groups tomorrow.