Material Teddy

I love Material Teddy, an inspiring project by recent Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Makikio Shinoda. It combines my love for material exploration and anything baby-related and is such a beautifully crafted object. I would love to have one for L!

"Material Teddy is made of various untreated natural materials that allow children to play and stimulate their senses to encourage the development of a healthy and balanced cognitive system. It reintroduces children to a rich sensory experience by stimulating the five senses". Images and text from Makiko Shinoda's website.

Street shots: Eindhoven

Order & Chaos

Some great ideas for presenting imagery and photographs, all seen at Dutch Design Week (except second row right - from Frieze Art Fair, London). *Polaroids in lines or pinned haphazardly *framed over patterned wallpaper and tapestry *boxed drawings *series of photographs documenting one place - the entire image...close-ups...textures.

Also loved the exhibition titles GLAMOUR & DUST and ORDER & CHAOS

Unexpected colour

Injections of colour from Eindhoven - exhibition backdrops, benches and window frames, flowers, cables and sticky tape, kites and lanterns, kitsch lace tablecloths and textured walls.

Multiples\2

Collections seen at Dutch Design Week. Fragile and delicate butterfly wings digitally printed onto thin rubber, hand-stitched into 3D forms and over-flocked for a soft, dusty finish. Experimental ceramic work-in-progress pieces exhibited in rows and grids, unfinished or imperfect, exploring how materials react to each other, coloured glazes, matt and shine, dry and powdered, hard and soft, expanding and sunken forms.

Wool Filler

One of my most favourite things from Eindhoven was Wolplamuur (Wool Filler) by Heleen Klopper. She explores the idea of mending holes in clothes by felting the area with a contrast colour wool fibre, creating textured circular patches by needlepunching the fibres into the cloth. She was also selling DIY kits at the show where you could pick your own colour wools along with a needle, sponge and instructions....why didn't I get one?!

Plaster and dust

The first of my Dutch Design Week posts is from a fantastic ceramics studio in TU/e (the technology university in Eindhoven) which was showing a small exhibition of work dotted around the space, while other artists were creating new work. I loved the interaction and the freedom of wandering around the studio, seeing the processes and machinery and sampling and final pieces, and documenting the mess, the tools, the colours, the textures, the stories.