I am lucky
to have mastered
the act
of turning anything
negative to positive

incoming

I have been super lazy with my blogging, I apologize. It seems my life is about to embark on a yet another new chapter. I am currently working on two sites , ideas that I have wanted to launch for more than a year now. Wacudo.com is a personal project that I have schemed for a few years now. Created for my obsessive nature to travel and dream of exploring every square inch of the globe it is a personal online travel journal with content from locals on where visitors should eat/sleep/go/visit/buy etc

I have been laying the pages out with a duo team, Selina Lalli my art director and Rakhi our illustrator. The website already has a nice feel to it, unintimidating, clean, inviting, just how I like my sites. The first countries/cities we will be plugging in are LONDON, NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, TAMPA, BAHRAIN, KUWAIT, OMAN, ABU DHABI, DUBAI, BEIRUT and my personal fave TOKYO. This does mean that I will be saving up to buy airplane tickets, if there is anything I would love to do for a living it's travel.

The other site I am launching is Sketchbook Live, an online magazine version of Sketchbook Magazine. As my readers/loyal fans know Sketchbook is available to buy as a print publication/pdf we also have Sketchbook TV and a blog but we DO NOT have a horizontal online archive of all our blog features so we are moving camp.

It is a slower process than I thought with a team of 3 working on moving all 600 articles to the new site. Laura Sam- content editor, Lauren - content editor's assistant, and Amy Edgar - project manager have been moving every credit and thumbnail over cups of coffee and cake.




I do try to take the necessary steps to be innovative. I don't ever seem to be satisfied with production levels and want things faster, sharper, easier. I am glad that I am constantly evolving Sketchbook. It is a mission of mine to be updated , to make things fresh and new and to never be out of date so Sketchbook and all my projects really will be a work in progress.

Send over your feedback on Wacudo and Sketchbooklive folks!

Lecturing @ Chelsea

So I was asked to come lecture at the University of the Arts London and share my experience as a design student all the way to the launch of Sketchbook and becoming the editor for the Dia Magazine. It was a phenomenal expiernce and I was asked to lecture again next year. Really looking forward to it!

Sketchbook writer Elizabeth Pasquale attended my series of lectures and covered it for the SB blog. Read more of it below!

Our Editor was asked to be a guest lecturer at the University of the Arts, Chelsea College of Art and Design where she used to be a student. Asked by her tutor Emily Artinian, she was invited to discuss her experiences during her foundation year all the way through completing her Bachelors in Interior Design, as well as her experiences working with fashion and starting-up her own publication.

It was an intense turnout with over 400 students who attended her two part lecture. ‘What happened to students ditching or turning up late?’ she asked me as rows of foundation students showed up a half hour early.

Wafa started her lecture by discussing her home country of Bahrain and painting a picture of what the art and design scene was like there. She then went to discuss her culture shock going from an American style high school to a British Art school one and how shocking the crit system was to her as a student.

Moving on she described having a double life when starting her BA and working practically full time with designer extraordinaire Liza Bruce. ‘I never said no to Liza, I worked weekends/summer holidays at one point doing 6 days a week. Working with Liza and her husband Nicholas was my first experience working with designers that were passionate about what they were doing, and doing it for a living. I really felt like I was being mentored going from sales, to PR, to buying, to window display, to pricing and assisting with all parts of the running of the business.’
Having graduated Wafa then went on to create her own blog, Fashion Ambitions where she aimed to document her work experiences assisting Marko Matysik, interning with On/Off, working in fashion journalism and publishing her work with Prim and Borderline magazine.
Wafa then went into great detail on how she managed to start up Sketchbook, with no budget; and emailing more than 200 people a day to request contributions and illustrations. ‘Everyone told me that I would never be able to launch a print publication, at the recession, with print media dying. But I did and Sketchbook was born. I also never met anyone in the first 5 months because as soon as people saw I was a 22 year old girl fresh out of university they didn’t want to work with me. I had to really sell the concept via email.’

We spent a few minutes with Wafa after she was done with her lecture. Read the rest of the interview here..

Collage-athon

FA loves Collage. Especially collages on London maps. These images were taken from the Super Contemporary exhibit at the Design Museum: a retrospect celebrating past, present, and future of London. These collages dotted the gallery, and I couldn't help but snap away at the lovely notes, post-its, Polaroids, and drawings that highlighted passages in the streets of this beautiful city.

Fabric Hunting

Luma and I finally put aside our work schedules to spend a hot crispy Saturday fabric hunting. On Berwick street we hit up six fabric stores, Liberty, John Lewis, and still had time for sushi and vintage store exploring before the sun went down. My favorite fabric store was the Cloth House, for its warm hospitality, its chic decor and wonderful fabrics (You can take a tour of their store on the Cloth House website). Me and lumbars found most of our fabrics from there, including some we didn't have on our long list. All the fabric stores had something new to offer; the Silk House had a great selection of Giambatista Valli inspired fabrics, Liberty won me over with thier vintage rolls of flower prints and large black/gold buttons, and John Lewis had a variety of fine jungle/animal prints plus a range of Cathy Kidston's famous fabric prints.

Cloth House

Pretty Trimmings

Lonely Buttons

Ribbon Mania

An Assortmet of Buckles and Buttons

I imagined stitching these buckles on a t-shirt dress

Buttons in Jars

Organic Fabrics

Warm Window Display, love the pegs+the sewing machine

Our choice of fabrics

The Silk House

This fabrics store was further down the road and not on our fabric store. Store had a masculine feel to it with thicker fabcris, and darker choice of colour.

The odd stop- Beyond Retro store in Soho

Browse shopping in Liberty

Dainty tights

At the famous fabric section in Liberty I loved..
Vintage Buttons

First Aid Stitching Kits

A wad of traditional fabric samples

Trimmings, Bits and Bobs, Ribbons

A million buttons

Thread colour swatch

A whole lotta yarn

Our final picks of the buttons

If only my house was Liberty

My With Love Ribbon - had to have it, no idea what I'm going to do with it

John Lewis
Recycled tags