Street Treasures

I love stumbling across different pieces of furniture, books, chairs, tables or really anything in the street. Saturday I was walking back to my apartment after getting a prescription filled at my pharmacy and I saw a construction worker sitting and smoking on what appeared to be a side table with tapered legs. I walked past it but after one block my curiosity got the best of me. I walked back and asked the man if he was throwing it away. He smiled and said its yours! I lugged this beauty with me the rest of the way and it has found a new home in my living room. Unfortunately it does need a little tlc, the bottom drawer needs to be glued back together, but it is nothing that a little wood glue and clamping can't fix.



The table has two peculiar shaped drawers on the sides, that I absolutely adore.



Thank you streets of Brooklyn for giving me an early birthday present!

Soft Prototypes Class

The first half of my soft prototypes class was focused on sewing, and pattern making. Here is one of my first projects, Although the basic pattern is very simple, I wanted this bag to have my own personal touch to it and I think it worked! Tonight in class we will be picking our final backpack designs. I will be blogging about my entire design process so stay tuned!

I <3 Tea

I have been drinking too much yogi lemon ginger green tea. I liked this quote on my tea bag so much that it has been sitting on my shelf right above my computer with my little birdie to serve as a reminder to myself.

My Copenhagen Exhibit

My final piece that I have been blogging about all summer will be in the My Copenhagen show along with the rest of my classmates work. The exhibit will include textiles, furniture, glass, and architecture/interior design. The show is Denmark was lovely and I expect nothing less from this one also. I will be at the reception on Friday at 6. Hope to see you all there!

Calling all mothers!

The final project for my soft prototypes class is to design the ultimate backpack for a certain demographic. I have decided to focus on the urban mom on the go and designing the ultimate diaper bag. If you wouldn’t mind answering a few simple questions if you fit this criteria I would greatly appreciate it! It will help me with my research in designing my final product.


1) What kind of diaper bag do you currently use or have in the past?
2) What did you like and dislike about your diaper bag
3) How much would you be willing to spend on a diaper bag?
4) As far as the tote diaper bag or backpack bag do you have a preference? If so why?
5) What components are essential to a diaper bag? Changing Pad? Clips for keys and pacifiers? Thermal pockets for bottles? Having certain items accessible?
6) Does fashion play a part when choosing a diaper bag?
7) Do you use your diaper bag to store other items that are not related to your child?

optional - if you could include a brief description of yourself, including where you reside, how many children you have, or any other information you think that I would find vital that would be wonderful! Thanks so much!

Self Indulgent Birthday Wishlist

It is finally October. My favorite month, and you know what that means, 19 days until my birthday! My father called me on the phone the other day asking what I wanted for my birthday, so here is a silly little wish list of things I have had my eyes on.



Capezio T-Strap Size 7
I left my pair that my mother bought me in the hostel in Helsinki, and my feet just haven't been the same since. :(


Cheap Headphones that I can afford to break or lose, I wish these came in adult sizes!



I think that this Marimekko dress designed by Mika Piirainen is absolutely perfect. Size 36 please!



Right before I went to Copenhagen I ordered a bunch of samples from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab and have been meaning to buy a bigger bottle of Snake Oil and Antique Lace.



I have my eye set on this knitting machine on ebay, or really any knitting machine for that matter. I can't wait for the weather to start to get chilly so I can break out all of he knitswear!

Website makeover! Someone to redesign my poor website for me (which is currently not up but is usually located at www.KimberlyLewis.net) since I have still not yet learned how to use dreamweaver!



You can always win me over with flowers, hydrangeas are my favorite!

Stoop Sale Treasures

I have been collecting the original Nancy Drew books since I was about eight. It all started with my mother giving me her small collection of books that she had been given secondhand through a family friend. Once I had a taste of the first few in the series, we made it our personal goal for her and myself to read all of the original 56. My mother being the bookworm that she was would often pick up used copies at old book stores, and flea markets for me. My grandmother was in on it too, she remembered fondly reading the books before she would give them as Christmas presents to my mother when she was little. My family would take small vacations up to northern New Hampshire and scout out all of the used book stores in search of trying to complete my collection. It grew slowly from the originals that my mother had passed on to me.

Since my mothers passing on December 21st '06, my itch to finish my collection has started back up again. Being an avid thrifter, I am always scanning the shelves for the blue or yellow spines. I usually find them everyone in a while, but yesterday I found not just one but SIX older copies (print run 1932 - 1945) laying outside a brownstone in my neighborhood at the annual end of summer stoop sale.



Five of them from what I can gather where printed either between 1932 - 1939 because of the glossy frontispieces and the orange endpapers.



The sixth one is a war time edition with the frontispiece on plain paper so I would date it at 1943- 1945.



The lady who I bought them from seems to have a lot more which she did not put out at the stoop sale. After a a little chat about how I only needed 8 more to complete my collection she gave me her phone number, apparently she had many more inside her house and she said that she would love to help me! I think I may be making a phone call in the near future.

Yesterday I spent countless hours rearranging and decorating. Here is a sneak peak or my Nancy Drew collection, more photos of my apartment will follow!

Things are finally starting to settle into place. As of today I have a new internship! I will be interning for Kim Seybert starting Monday. I am quite excited, to experience a different side of the home furnishings world. My first internship was at Twenty2 where I saw all the behind the scenes from Kyra and Rob's high end wallpaper and fabric company. Over the summer I interned at Sunham Home Fashions, where their focus was on bed textiles, such as quilts, duvets, and sheets for companies such as JCPenny, Macy's, Bed Bath and Beyond, Linens and Things and more. I am really excited to be expanding my horizons and starting at Kim Seybert who is known for her fashion infused high end table top accessories that can be found at Saks, Neimans and Bergdorfs.



Speaking of things settling into place, I bought a small couch via craigslist for my new apartment today. I am taking photos of my newly decorated space tomorrow. So check back.

After much unneeded stress (ie being robbed, moving into my new place, starting school etc etc) things are finally settling into a nice familiar pattern. Check back soon (perhaps this weekend?) for regular blog updates!

Back in BK!!

I am back in Brooklyn and all moved into my new apartment, which I LOVE! Unfortunately we do not have our internet connection hooked up, the guy is coming on Thursday. Class starts Monday, here is what my schedule looks like

Monday
5:00 - 7:50 Pro Practice and Portfolio

Tuesday
9:30 - 12:20 Literature of Popular Culture
2:00 - 4:50 Science Illustration
6:00 - 8:50 Soft Prototypes

Wednesday

5:00 - 7:50 Solidworks 2 (not officially signed up for this yet)

Thursday

9:30 - 12:20 Fashion and Modernism
2:00 - 4:50 Space Analysis

Hopefully filling in the empty space with teaching dance and gymnastics classes and finishing my tabletop work!

Exhibition!

Wednesday night was the opening of the exhibition of all of the DIS student work! It was wonderful to see everything set up and finally get to sit back and relax and enjoy our work from a far.



Here is my final piece in front of two lovely chairs!

Show at Danmarks Designskole

For those of you who happen to be in Copenhagen on Wednesday or Thursday come check out the DIS Textile, Furniture, Glass and Architecture Show at the Danmarks Designskole. The opening starts at 4, and my final piece along with the rest of my classmates will be on display. If you can't make it to Denmark, I will be sure to post the dates of when the Pratt in Copenhagen show will be. It is usually sometime in the fall at the Brooklyn campus.

Lisbet Friis

Last Monday my class took a trip to the studio of Lisbet Friis. We took the S tog to the outskirts of Copenhagen and walked quite a ways to small community that George Jensen had his factories along with houses and other amenities for his workers. Today the community is made up of craftspeople and artists who must apply to get a studio and house. The waiting list for the community is out of control and Lisbet mentioned that she put her name on the list right out of college and finally when her three children left the house, got the call that she was selected. The area is extremely picturesque and I felt like I was walking through the set of some fairy tale movie.







Before getting to Lisbet's studio we stopped at Dyerhaven, which is the royal families hunting grounds. Wild deer were everywhere, I have never seen so many in my life!



Lisbet welcomed up into her studio, and even gave us a little snack afterwards! She explained to us her working process, and we got to get a hands on look at a bunch of her printed textiles. I fell in love with her printed works on paper with tongue in cheek phrases on them. She did a series of them for an exhibition, and will be coming out with english versions soon!






Thanks Lisbet!

I am ridiculously tired, due being on my feet for 12+ hours printing all week, running around helping other people print etc. So I will leave you with this poster that I see everyday at the Design School.



haha I love it.

I am done!

The last few days have been pretty intense. I was in the first group to start printing and started dying my fabric on Monday after a trip to Lisbet Friis' studio (check back tomorrow for more on that!)

I started off by choosing my final colors for the piece, and fabric. I chose with a light weight linen. I then started the dying process.

After about an hour of stirring, I realized that something was terribly wrong. My fabric was not supposed to be this light, or PINK!



Malene adjusted the recipe and after lots of stirring and time I ended up with the color that I had in mind.



Here I am checking the time right before adding the acid solution that will stop the dying process. In total I stood and stirred for 2 hours and 30 minutes! My poor hands had blisters afterwards!



Now on to the printing!



To make sure that our registration was aligned correctly we this bar and various measurements on the side of the table that corresponded with the size of our screen and the repeat of our pattern. Every measurement must be double checked before printing every single time down to the millimeter or the repeat will not line up correctly.



Since everything must be extremely accurate and we do not have clamps to hold the screen or bar down everyone was assigned a printing buddy. Ashley double checked all of my measurements and held my screen down through out the entire process. Thanks Ashley!



The hardest part for me was printing the middle!



After way to many hours I was finally finished with my first color seperation!



No process photos exist of printing the second layer since it was getting extremely late. At 4 am I crashed in the laundry room and made myself a makeshift bed out of drop cloths, don't worry they are clean even though they don't look it! I woke up at 7:30 to finish my print and put on the finishing details that I was too tired to do before my nap.



I am finally finished! All that is left is the after care.





Like washing and boiling...


and ironing in this crazy machine!


I will post photos of the completed fabric when it is all hemmed in its entirety.

Tomorrow check back for photos from Lisbet Friis' studio and the Denmark Designskole fashion show!

I am supposed to start printing my final 3 meter piece tomorrow but I am unsure if this is going to work considering I still do not have screens! This weekend was an absolute disaster. We finally had nice weather and while everyone was out at the beach, I was working inside and everything was going wrong! One good thing was that I figured out all of my colorways and ended up mixing all of my dyes!



I used the color palettes that I had made while I was in Sweden and Finland as a jumping off point for choosing my swatches.



Here are colorways that I will be using in my final piece and small samples. I am printing my final piece in the top colorway, the rest I will show in small samples.



In the kitchen mixing my dyes using the recipes on the back of the swatches.

Is it really Friday already?! This week has flown by, my past few days have looked something like this.




I have been finalizing my pattern on my teeny powerbook in the studio! I have chosen to put my images on to screens via computer while Ashley, who is in the foreground is going about the process by hand cutting out her pattern using red film.

Of course I went through my design process in a kind of round-a-bout fashion like always. I had originally started the design process by hand but quickly found that my designs were lacking structure and were looking very messy. I then scanned in my hand drawings and redid them in illustrator, but made sure to keep some of the hand aspect in the design. After I had played around with the different elements that I wanted and made a bunch of different wheel flowers. I chose the elements that I wanted and printed them out in varying sizes. I ended up cutting up all the different elements that I had printed out and made an initial collage playing with the negative and positive space, and scale in mind. After I was satisfied with the collage I went and made copies of the repeat and taped up it together so I could see it in full scale as opposed to working with it on a computer screen, which can be deceiving. I repeated the collage process several times with varying elements until I was satisfied. I then re-scanned the finalized collage, and brought it back into illustrator and used the files from before to reconstruct the new repeat. This time I had to make sure that all of the right elements were placed in the right layer since I will be printing the two layers out separately in full scale on the plotter and then they can be exposed to the screen. Tomorrow I am going to run my finalized design by Gunhilde and if everything goes smoothly I should be starting to prepare my screens soon!

Photo via Ashley's Blog

Weekend Adventures

On Saturday I went over to the Danish Museum of Art and Craft to check out the textile and dress collection. I was told by my professor that there are a lot of Marie Gudme Leth's work and was excited to see it in person as opposed to in a book. I was disappointed to find out when I arrived that the collection was closed for renovation. :( Other than that the museum was small yet nice.

I was immediately drawn to the energy and movement in Danish ceramist Michael Geertsen's work. His pieces were bold in color and had a lovely rhythm to them . They reminded me of my sophomore 3D studio in which we composed sculptures out of found objects using line, plane, and volume. Why didn't I think of using tableware? I wonder what Lenny, my 3D professor would say about this.



I only got to see one of Marie Gudme Leth's textiles but it was worth the trip anyways, it was even more lovely in person!




This particular textile by Arne Jacobsen really caught my eye not only because of the bright colors but the slightly irregular line patternsthat produced a great movement to the piece.



I was ecstatic to see these initial collages for Poul Henningsen's Artichoke Lamp. I love seeing the process and thinking that is behind art and design, not to mention that I love to collage! These were made with pencil, colored acrylics, wrapping paper, stationary and parchment paper.



After my visit to the museum and lots of downpouring I later met up with two fellow textile friends Ashley and Holly and we splurged a bit and had dinner by the canal.



My seafood salad, and strawberry lime cider were perfect!



Holly and Ashley at dinner, cheers or as the Danish say Skål!

Look for an update tomorrow with more progress of my final piece plus photos from Sunday!