As a part of The Southbank’s summer festival The Festival of Love and the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s (LPO) year long festival, Rachmaninoff: Inside Out, Nadia-Anne Ricketts was commissioned to create a textile art piece for the Royal Festival Hall interpreting Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2. This was used within David Lean’s award winning 1945 love film Brief Encounter, which was screened at the Hall in August, and was accompanied by a newly commissioned orchestral soundtrack played by the LPO itself.

She has also designed  a small capsule collection  of woven textiles with three design variations, which show how one song can be translated into a handful of designs, either literally or abstract. These are currently available to purchase at The Southbank Centre.

At her London design studio, BeatWoven, Ricketts has designed a bespoke audio software program that translates any played music into visual patterns, especially for weaving. “Similar to that of a very granulated, broken down sound wave, it inspects and discovers the patterns happening within the sound wave.”

For the commissioned piece, she started by playing the Rachmaninoff concerto over and over through the software to analyse and become familiar with the patterns. Though the basic colour palette was determined by the interior design of the Royal Festival Hall, where it will be installed, Ricketts also uses her previous performing experience to connect with the music, juxtaposed with extensive research for each song, including the artist, genre, era and story behind its composition, to ultimately choose colour combinations and yarns. “When designing my musical textile pieces I feel that I am expressing my passion for music in a visual way, rather than as a dance performance. The designing and making process becomes my visual music performance”.
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Blodwen, the on-line lifestyle brand specialising in the design and manufacture of hand-crafted
luxury homewares,textiles and furniture – made in Wales, is launching a new textile collection
inspired by the discovery of a historical archive of Welsh blanket patterns dating from the 1700’s.

The Collection is part of the Heritage Blanket Project – a community initiative designed to
celebrate the ‘Craft and Industry of the Weaver’. It aims to resurrect historical patterns into a
range of contemporary textiles – each with a unique story to tell.

Using digital visualisation and virtual sampling technologies together with contemporary
yarns,colourways and finishes, the Project is an illustration of Blodwen’s on-going commitment
to the design and manufacture of unique homewares which fuse time-honoured skills with
modern craftsmanship.

Blodwen’s first Heritage Collection offers a range of blankets, throws, quilts and
cushions – all revived from age-old hand-drawn designs. The textiles are made from 100% pure
new wool and woven at Blodwen’s 180 year old mill in the Teifi Valley, on its original 1930’s
Dobcross looms.

The ‘Hiraeth’ (Longing) blanket is a bold geometric chequer-board design in monochrome and red. The ‘Pinwheel’ blanket is inspired by the name given to the most iconic of traditional Welsh Quilt designs, and comes in a striking indigo and red.

Both blankets feature an embroidered panel with a verse taken from the book and written by the weaver. Continue reading →

Fiorete began its production in 1934 at Como, Italy specialising in the production of interior decorative fabrics, using the natural fibres of the time such as silk and cotton. By 1950 they were the first company to use synthetic fibres. At Fiorete, they have been constantly innovating and investing in R&D and in their production system.

Fiorete have created a system of refined domotics which include a yarn warehouse that is fully automatised and bidirectional connections between the weaving plants and management system. They feel they are a leading company in quality innovation gaining the Seri.co certification and OEKO-TEX.

Fiorete fabrics has been used in well known projects, by leading designers and architects in and around the world such as; Aria Sky Suites by Peter Marino, Las Vegas, The Burj Khalifa Armani Hotel, Dubai and the Nhow Hotel by Karim Rashid, Berlin.

With this spirit of constant innovation, search for new development and after three years of intensive studies, Fiorete have developed a new technology which allows weaving and integrating optical fibers on jacquard looms.

The optical fibre is a thin strand of glass or synthetic cable that carry light from one end to the other, without light in its length. The optical fibre filters out ultraviolet rays and infrared, does not transmit heat thus it is inflammable and can be immersed in liquid, making it one of the safest materials to use. It is compact, fan-less, has high light output, multicolour illuminators that requires almost no maintenance and is extremely energy efficient.

Its versatility makes it today, the most suitable alternative lighting systems where until recently was not possible to achieve better results in the desired colour definition that can be used for a multitude of lighting applications in home decoration and interior architectures. Due to these features it is now used in various sectors such as exhibitions, various types of industries, the arts and crafts, museums and scenography just to name a few.

The starting point for Fiorete was the vision to explore all the possibilities given by this new generation yarn such as the optical fibre, normally used in other fields and industries and to find an application to the industrial textile world. They were very excited in to be able to control light while giving radiance to our fabrics. In other words bringing “life” into fabrics.
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