Hello everyone!

Do you remember the live project I did for Blendworth during my second year at Blendworth? Well, if you don’t, you can read all about it here.

If you do, I guess you can tell by the title of this blog that I (along with 3 other talented students in my class) was chosen out of our class to do a weeks long work placement with them in the designs studio! Blendworth are a renowned British surface design and textile company that was established in 1921! Their fabrics and wallpapers are fantastic, and they have a wide range of different patterns and textures for you to choose from! Check out their website and collections here: http://www.blendworth.co.uk/

I made a top 10 list of their best sold fabrics and patterns from one of their collections. I also got to have a sneak peek at their new collection coming out next year! I won’t tell you what it is or the theme but I will update this post when their new collection comes out. I had to cut different colour way strips of their new designs, label them and place them in to a folder. I can’t wait to get my own samples of them when they come out!

I was asked to create some trend and colour boards for them to use as inspiration for future projects and they also let me print off some for myself to use for my projects in third year. I got to use the Heimtextil 2017/2018 Trends book to help me with researching. It’s given me loads of ideas for my Final Major Project!

(Image credit: Pinterest)

These are a few trend boards I created and a display board I added to for them. This board, along with the new trends for next year have inspired me for my Final Major Project! I can’t wait to get started!

I did a bit of archiving for them. I had to photograph a load of different fabrics, the repeats and details and the selvedge codes, write them down, give them a code number and then place them on the correct shelves in numerical order and add labels to the shelves. This was a lot of fun as I got to see some fabrics that have been around since Blendworth was established, so some of these fabrics were nearly 100 years old! How incredible is that? I found them so inspiring and interesting to see what was in style back then, and top see how far we’ve come today in textile and surface design. You must remember, back then they didn’t have computers and Photoshop to create their patterns and repeat, it was all done by hand and painted in to a repeat. Just astounding!

I did archiving for a few days and afterwards I had to upload the photographs on to a computer, label them with the right number code, place them in the right categorised folder and also type up all the codes, colours, names and details about the different fabrics.

I sat outside on my lunch break a lot with some of the girls and they were all so lovely! It was perfect weather all week. We had ice lollies and cookies on my last day.

I’ve really enjoyed my week there, I wish it didn’t have to end! Thank you so much to Southampton Solent University and Blendworth for this incredible opportunity! I’ve learn’t so much from working with you and it was a great experience to see how the surface design side of the industry works. I think it’s definitely helped me decide what I’d like to do in the future, both project and career wise!

Thank you for reading!

Danica x