In the meantime....

I'm finishing up my coursework, (for which I thankfully got an extension, due to the poo-head client of mine who decided not to pay me a substantial amount of money (and yes, it still wrankles, as is probably evident!)), so there'll be lots of posts going live in the next couple of days that are currently in 'draft' mode, as I add the last bits to them.

In the meantime, I thought I'd share my bit in the local paper, the Pontefract and Castleford Express.

We had to write press releases for college, and I thought, 'well, since I've gone to the bother of writing it, I may as well e-mail it to anybody and everybody (relevant) whose e-mail address I can find.  Obviously, journalists get tons of these things, and I was sending it completely  unsolicited, and out of the blue, so I was all prepared to be ignored by everybody.  I wasn't prepared when the nice lady from the local paper actually e-mailed me in reply, saying she wanted to put something in the paper about me.

Anyway, I did an interview over the phone, and a nice photographer came round and took some pictures of me and some hats, in my workroom, and then in the back garden.

And they printed the one in the garden!!  On page two!!  As picture of the week!!  (I'd expected to be buried away on page 37, just underneath news about the local school fete.)

Anyway, this is the photo I took of the photo, just to prove it really happened  :o)

Back at college...

Yesterday was our first day back at college.  I'm all re-registered, and paid up (till Christmas, anyway).

Most of the work this year will be gearing up for our final collections, to be shown in the end of year show / exhibition next summer, when the college gets turned into a gallery for a week.   So yesterday was all about putting a collection together, and how to do the research involved in that.

We have to keep a research diary - mine will be this blog, in conjunction with Pinterest boards that I'll link to.  As the 'summer collections' from last year are now done, and all marked up, I'm going to archive the bibliography page for that by copying all of the information to a blog post (in case anybody finds it interesting).  I'm also going to move the links to my 'summer collection' Pinterest boards to the same blog post.  That way I'll have the space to add links to the boards I'm using for the collection this year, and to add a bibliography page for that (a bibliography is not in the brief, but it'll help keep me on track in terms of what I've looked at).

I still haven't firmly decided what I'm going to be researching for my collection.  I've been looking at fossils and geology...  There's a museum in Newcastle - now the 'Great North Museum: Hancock', though to me it'll always be The Hancock Museum - in which I practically lived when I was a kid.  We went there over the summer, when we were at home for a family party, and it's changed a lot - but I still recognised most of the exhibits!  It has lost something of what it once was - it's a bit more generic now than it used to be - but there is a lot more of the geological collection on display.  Photos, etc, to follow!

At the same time, I've been looking through my books at ways that fabric was manipulated in history - through plaiting, twisting, cutting, stamping, heat stamping, slashing, pleating, etc.

And there's an advertising picture that really caught my eye in a magazine of Ralph Lauren's A/W collection - very 20s/30s country house, but updated by using modern cuts, and mixing up leathers and tweeds and animal prints.  Again, I'll share pics in the next couple of days, once I've found them!

As I write I have no idea of the direction in which this will take me.

Meanwhile, we've been given a mini-brief, to design a black felt hat - more of which in my next post!!