Dries Van Noten heaven

As a textile designer and colour lover, it's always great to see pattern and colour on the catwalk and Dries Van Noten is perfect at carrying the two off to beautiful excess. His latest collection is a nod to “nocturnal glamour” and the glam of the ’70s and ’80s fashions. His inspiration was a contemporary party girl, combining casual with glamour. He applied a selection of acid greens and fuchsia jungle prints to fluid pyjama shapes and added '90s grunge-influenced plaids to brightly coloured floral trousers. There was an amazing array of colour and mixed up prints, such as oversized floral trousers mixed with an acid green floral trench coat. As the show went on, the colour intensified with deep purple shades, emerald velvet, deco prints and even fabulous snakeskin boots. Heaven!

Khaadi

On Saturday I braved a trip to Westfield in West London with my friend Audrey. I got there early and had a quick mooch around, and I came across a shop called Khaadi which stuck out from the crowd of high street names. My first reaction was to the blast of colour on show. They had beautiful chairs upholstered in stunningly bright embroideries and this drew me in. The rest of the shop was a blaze of colour, print and texture.

Khaadi, which means "hand woven", started in Karachi, Pakistan where its chairman and founder, Shamoon Sultan, wanted to revive the ancient art of the handloom. It creates a fusion of styles which complement both the East and the West and each garment incorporates pattern and embroidery to stunning effect.

Blog mention

I'm proud to say that some of the designs I did for Makower have recently been mentioned on the Print and Pattern blog. This group is called Flo's Garden and was named after my neice!

Which came first?

A while ago I designed a group of fabric prints for Makower UK, called Chicken and Egg. 

My mum has just given me a lovely present, made from some of that fabric. It uses the blue chicken design and is beautifully edged with some of the striped fabric from the same group. It's designed to be used to line a bread basket, which is exactly what we will be doing with it tonight. It will be keeping the pitta bread warm that will accompany our Middle Eastern-inspired meal. Thanks mum!

You can see the full range of Chicken and Egg designs on my portfolio website here.