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BFTT: SME R&D Support Programme Funding Call | Round 2

1 July 2020 General / News / Reseach
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The Business of Fashion, Textiles & Technology (BFTT), SME R&D Support Programme is now open for Expressions of Interest (EOI).

The fashion, textiles and technology related sector (FTT) is  innovative and multidisciplinary, informing many adjacent sectors in the wider industry. Quite literally, spanning agriculture to advertising.

This funding call is looking to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the development of the next generation of products, services and experiences in the fashion, textiles and technology sectors – with sustainable innovation at their core.

They look forward to hearing from FTT companies, and those in the wider STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) fields interested in collaborating with the FTT sector, who would like to achieve a step-change in their business trajectory.

You can find more information about the programme, including eligibility, selection criteria, core funding themes and key dates here.

Core themes:

  • Reimagining materials and production
  • Inspiring sustainable consumers
  • Uncovering hidden data and insight
  • Designing new experiences

This year they are also open to partnerships (joint applications), from SME / SME, or SME / SME+ partnerships helping scale the proposed innovations

BFTT SME R&D Support Programme – Expression of Interest Form

BFTT SME R&D Support Programme Round 2 – FAQs

Deadline to register your Expression of Interest: 7 September 2020

Learn more about the 10 R&D projects funded during the initial funding call here.

Text: BFTT. Image credit: © AWAYTOMARS Ltd

Woven Jacquard Engineered Garment Research: Graysha Audren | Maike Jansen

20 December 2019 Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News / Reseach
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Graduate Research Weaver Profiles: Graysha Audren | Maike Jansen

Seamless by Graysha Audren
Textile designer, Graysha Audren is a recent weave graduate of Central Saint Martins with a focus on sustainable innovation.  She believes good designers are problem solvers at heart with the power to invoke change, disrupt systems, and design out inefficiencies. The textile industry interweaves global politics, economics, trade, society, and business. The industry is a web of complicated supply chains where sustainability needs design-led systemic transparency. To change the entire system and to affect real change, Graysha focuses holistically on questioning inefficient and unsustainable systems, starting at the beginning: the making of the cloth.

Her current project, Seamless, exhibited at the London Design Festival in partnership with Maison/0 and LVMH, proposes a revolutionary way of seamlessly weaving clothing for material waste reduction and supply chain efficiency. Continue reading →

Whitchurch Silk Mill: Heritage Work Placements

31 May 2019 General / Jobs / News
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Whitchurch Silk Mill are offering 4 x 6-week Heritage Weaving Placements, July to August 2019.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund Preserving the Fabric project has funded the restoration and major improvements to Whitchurch Silk Mill, a Grade Two* listed Georgian watermill on the banks of the River Test in rural Hampshire.  

They are now inviting applications from those studying woven textiles or anyone with experience or interest in working with textiles to apply for a six-week placement.

Deadline for applications: June 7th 2019 – Click here for more details.

Jacquard x Google Arts & Culture – Artist Residency

10 March 2019 Awards / Competitions / Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News / Reseach
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Google Arts & Culture and Jacquard (Google ATAP) are launching the first artist-in-residency with the goal of exploring synergies between technology, art, and fashion.

The programme
Google Arts & Culture and Jacquard (Google ATAP) are launching the first artist-in-residency with the goal of exploring synergies between technology, art, and fashion at Google Arts & Culture Lab in Paris. Curated by Pamela Golbin, the program will enable three artists to conceive of and create works that explore textiles, connectivity, and creativity over the course of a five month residency. 

This residency will grant the three artists access to the core of Jacquard technology, factories in Japan, mentoring from Jacquard and Google Arts & Culture engineers, mentoring from Pamela Golbin and Memo Akten, and access to the Google Lab space and resources in Paris. 

The end of the residency will be celebrated by showcasing the art installations at a private event in October 2019 and potential partner museums. Additionally, final work and the Making Of process will be featured in a dedicated section on Google Arts & Culture platform. 
 Artists will own the IP of their artwork.

The Residency includes:
– Weekly advisory meetings with Google Arts & Culture Lab and Jacquard engineers – Access to Jacquard Research and Development teams – Artist mentors : Pamela Golbin and Memo Akten – Dedicated Creative Coder and hardware prototyping team- Jacquard Factory visit and inspiration trip in Japan- Three weeks at the Google Arts and Culture lab in Paris- Stipend of 10k€ gross for each artist – Production budget and Jacquard material production: 15k€ for each artist

Continue reading →

Rita Parniczky: ‘Broken Bones’

10 March 2019 Awards / General / New weave developments / News / Workshops
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Rita Parniczky works with photography, video and sculpture including weave and mixed media. Her work predominantly explores structure, visual change, slow time and human behaviour.

Amongst other awards, the work has received the Wall Hanging Award from The Worshipful Company of Weavers and is included in the permanent collection of the V&A Museum.

Most recently, Rita has become recipient of the Theo Moorman Trust Award. Her project reassessed her woven work investigating the role of textiles through experimentation, with new structural works and meeting Sheila Hicks.

Continue reading →

The Royal Pavillion – Brighton: His Majesty’s Geranium and Gold Silk

22 October 2018 Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News / Reseach
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Humphries Weaving of Sudbury, Suffolk was involved in the prestigious national restoration at the Brighton Pavilion Saloon 

Built for George IV when he was Prince of Wales, the Royal Pavilion in Brighton is one of the most extravagant buildings of its age.

The room is now faithfully restored to its 1823 glory after conservation and restoration work started in 2002 and costing in the region of £390,000.

Highlights of the restoration include silver and ‘pearl white’ wall decoration using platinum leaf and the revitalisation of the magnificent gilding. A newly commissioned reproduction circular carpet by Axminster Carpets, with a lavish design of dragons, sun rays and lotus leaves adorns the floor.

Geranium and Gold silk woven by Humphries Weaving, Sudbury has been used for wall panels, magnificent drapery and furniture. A film has been made of the process of reproducing the original fabric.

The quest for His Majesty’s silk from Humphries Weaving on Vimeo. Continue reading →

Anni Albers: Tate Modern

15 September 2018 Events / Exhibitions / General / News / Publication
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This autumn Tate Modern will present the UK’s first major retrospective of the work of Anni Albers (1899-1994). This exhibition will bring together her most important works from major collections in the US and Europe, many of which will be shown in the UK for the first time, to highlight Albers’s significance as an artist.

Opening ahead of the centenary of the Bauhaus in 2019, this exhibition is long overdue recognition of Albers’s pivotal contribution to modern art and design, and part of Tate Modern’s wider commitment to showing artists working in textiles.

Anni Albers combined the ancient craft of hand-weaving with the language of modern art, finding within the medium many possibilities for the expression of modern life.

Featuring over 350 objects including beautiful small-scale studies, large wall-hangings, jewellery made from everyday items, and textiles designed for mass production, this exhibition will explore the many aspects of Albers’s practice – such as the intersection between art and craft; hand-weaving and machine production; ancient and modern.

Albers held a long-standing interest in the relationship between textiles and architecture and the show will highlight her lesser-known commissioned works in this area. The exhibition design will take inspiration from the artist’s own writings, such as her seminal essay ‘The Pliable Plane: Textiles in Architecture’, 1957, in which Albers advocates ‘a new understanding between the architect and the inventive weaver’.

Born in Berlin at the turn of the century, Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann became a student at the Bauhaus in 1922, where she met her husband Josef Albers and other key modernist figures like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Though the Bauhaus aspired to equality between the sexes, women were still discouraged from learning certain disciplines including painting. Albers began weaving by default, but it was in textiles that she found her means of expression, dedicating herself to the medium for the majority of her career.

The exhibition will explore how, here in the school’s vibrant weaving workshop, traditional hand-weaving was redefined as modern art. Continue reading →

Makers’ Tales’: Catarina Riccabona

11 September 2018 Company Profile / Events / Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News / Workshops
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‘Makers’ Tales’ showcase: Catarina Riccabona at the Guy Goodfellow Collection Showroom

 In celebration of the London Design Festival, textile artist and weaver Catarina Riccabona will be joining the series of  ‘Makers’ Tales’ showcases in the Guy Goodfellow Collection showroom.

Cartarina loves working with her hands. She enjoy the flexibility, the spontaneous changes and the direct contact with the materials that is possible when weaving by hand.

She makes one-off interior pieces, mostly throws, and, more recently, wall hangings.

Her textiles are often large compositions featuring areas of juxtaposed weave structures.

Catarinas’ practice is based on environmental values. She works with a well-researched selection of yarns. She predominantly use natural (unbleached, undyed) linen in her warps. For the weft yarns she likes to work with linen, hemp, wool, alpaca and second-hand or recycled yarns.

Her favourite supplier for plant-dyed wool is a woman in Finland who grows all the ingredients in her own garden and dyes small batches of local rare breed wool by hand.

Every time her results differ slightly, and Catarina loves these subtle and unpredictable nuances.

Recycled linen can be another source of colour and also Catarina buys it from a UK company that re-spins industrial surplus into new yarn. The colours are limited and depend on what is available at any given time. She enjoys this challenge of finding solutions within a set of limitations.

Catarina also collect warp remnants from weave colleagues which she knots them back together to form a continuous string to be used in the weft. During weaving the little knots appear all over the cloth and form a distinct feature that is reminiscent of elements in tribal textiles from all over the world.

This hand-made and natural character that is typical of tribal textiles has always had a strong appeal for her.

‘Makers’ Tales’ showcases invited artists and makers in a series of exhibitions designed to celebrate the fine traditions of artisan design and production.

The latest showcase “Catarina Riccabona Hand-woven Textiles” is on from 17th September to 12th October. She will be at the GGC showroom on the 20th September for a “Meet the Maker” day to discuss her work and explain the ethos behind her practice.

Guy Goodfellow Collection Showroom.15 Langton Street, London SW10 0JB
www.guygoodfellowcollection.com   Tel: 020 7352 9002

Text and images, with thanks to Catarina Riccabona

Cockpit Arts / The Clothworkers’ Company Awards 2018

10 August 2018 Awards / General / New weave developments / News
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The Cockpit Arts / The Clothworkers’ Company Awards 2018

At the start of July Cockpit Arts in Deptford welcomed five weavers as part of The Clothworkers’ Company Awards. The awards, which are open to weavers who have graduated in the last five years, aim to assist weavers to set up in business by providing weaving equipment, business coaching and support. The 2018 weavers are: Sophie Graney, Vicky Cowin, Elizabeth Ashdown, Poppy Fuller Abbott, Alice Timmis and Claire Whelan.

Elizabeth Ashdown
Elizabeth’s practice focuses on hand woven, hand constructed and hand embellished Passementerie that are designed to be worn on the body as playful, luxurious and exuberant decorations and accessories. She also hand weaves bespoke lengths that are used to decorate interior accessories and furnishings. In addition, Elizabeth creates exuberant and lively large-scale fabrics that are created using Passementerie methods. Leader image Elizabeth Ashdown
i: @ashdowntextiles
email: info@elizabethashdown.co.uk

Alice Timmis
Alice Timmis is an artisan manufacturer working with the fashion industry. Her fabric collections combine industrial and hand-woven techniques and finishes. Weave is very linear. Alice tries to get away from that by treating her fabrics once they are off the loom with a range of finishing techniques including brushing, felting, shrinking and hand embroidery.

This year, especially, has been the busiest yet for her with collaborations with a number of London fashion designers for their A/W 18 collections. The fabrics that Alice created for designers were produced either by hand from her studio space in Cockpit Arts, or industrially in mills.

Working locally to London fashion designers, Alice offers bespoke and innovative fabrics that can be produced through various methods depending on the style of the client’s fashion collection.

Alice also freelances for the well established woven studio, Dash and Miller, through whom she sells her woven mixed media designs internationally to mills and well known fashion houses.
i: @alicetimmis
email:alicetimmis@gmail.com
Continue reading →

TexSelect 2018: Featured Designers

24 July 2018 Awards / Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News
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©Rosa Pearks

TexSelect 
TexSelect’s aim is to select, mentor and promote the UK’s most talented newly graduated textile designers, providing an opportunity for realistic development, and a vital bridge between higher education and the real, commercial world.

Those selected for this unique mentorship programme are introduced to buyers, press and sponsors at the TexSelect London Preview and at Europe’s leading fabric fair, Première Vision Paris, gaining exceptional first hand experience of the industry.

There are also opportunities to intern with some of Italy’s finest mills and manufacturers, to be trained on specialist CAD software, and to have work selected for a curated interiors collection.

TexSelect’s Hero Mentor scheme carries the support forward, linking designers with industry professionals who provide ongoing career mentorship.

Many TexSelect alumni now enjoy high-profile creative roles within the international textile, fashion and interior design industries.

The TexSelect charity is entirely funded by the generous sponsorship of industry, by British charitable foundations, and by individuals.  All believe wholeheartedly in supporting textile design talent and in encouraging design innovation and excellence.

The Designers will  be showing at Première Vision Designs, 19th- 21st Sept and on 20th September 2018 at 15.30 there will be the presentation of the TexSelect Prizes for Colour, Fashion, Pattern and Interiors. Also the presentation of The Woolmark Company TexSelect Award ; the Marks & Spencer TexSelect Fashion Fabric Award; and NEW for 2018: The Worshipful Company of Woolmen TexSelect Design Innovation Award for Wool in Interiors.

Venue: Première Vision Designs, Hall 5, Première Vision Paris, Parc d’Expositions de Paris-Nord, Villepinte.

Continue reading →

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