fashionambition

13 June 2009

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

12 June 2009

Urban Love

Instead of taking myself to Graduate Week and making myself useful I went Oxford Circus + furniture shopping on the Goodge. Urban Outfitters is one of my favorite shops, even though Anthropologie comes pretty close. The Book Bar on the top floor is my favorite space, and the pick of their books are creative collectibles.

Lamp Collage

Letter Collage

Underwear dress

My top pics- The Mary Kate Olsen book is surprisingly well put together and creative

Ultimate Book Bar - Every House's Must Have

11 June 2009

Portfolio Seminar

Today I went to a portfolio event specifically to attend a How To Make Magazines seminar that Richard Wilding was kind enough to get me a ticket for when I was in the states. My excitement fizzled over on my way there seeing the tube wasn't working (due to strikes) and the weather kept switching from showery to sunny every five seconds. I got to Central Westminster Hall, the same space where I graduated last year, to find out right before the seminar that Becky Smith the founder and creative director of Lula Magazine would also be amongst the other editors to share her magazine story. The one hour long stuffy bus journey and layered coats in arm has officially been worth the visit seeing as I am a huge Lula fan. I have the last four issues of Lula magazine on a corner of my beloved bookshelf on their own, like display pieces.

The Portfolio show had two large open hall spaces where you could view hundreds of illustration and photography portfolio's and talk to the agents that represented them. The show which was put together by Creative Review and Design Week also had an interesting project running at the space called Ryan's Boothnation project. Boothnation was no ordinary photo booth; it was a sophisticated photographic studio kitted out with state of the art photo booth and everyone who came along to the Portfolios was invited to have their picture taken in the booth to form part of a special CR publication. The Portfolio event was a great networking area, they even gave out massive creative review textbooks with all the portfolio's inside. I will be blogging more about the Magazine seminar in another post becauses I have so much info to sift through and share with you.