As part of my preparation for the British Craft Trade Fair I've been working on some new colourways and a couple of new designs. Both of which I find simultaneously invigorating and nerve-wrecking.
My design process is generally a little haphazard, with me often catching glimpses of fabric combinations that make my heart beat faster and combining that with a new idea or just using it to come up with a new colourway for an existing design.
But because I'm doing the show and because I've wanted to be a little more organised I've been trying to create a real process that has a definate beginning, middle and end. Something that I can try and follow in the future. Not to take away from the creative process, just to make it a little more controlled and manageable.
I started by deciding that I wanted to try and limit all my designs to three colourways that would convey a particular feeling (for me, if no one else). I then sat down and wrote out a list of all the designs that I wanted to focus on. I have been a little disorganised with this in the past and offer some products only in my Etsy shop and some different ones to a couple of different stores, with little rhyme or reason.
Some designs I love to make, regardless of whether they are truly cost effective (nothing is truly cost effective!) and some are just too much work for too little return. So I decided which products I wanted to keep making and which I would either drop completely or increase the price to reflect the amount of work involved in producing them.
After that I spent a lot of time staring at tear sheets and fabric swatches, choosing the combinations that I wanted to use to make up the three new colourways.
I'm enjoying the process and am hoping that it will lead to a coherence in my collection that I'm not convinced has been there before. But I'm also discovering that part of the process for me, is to grab random pieces of fabric and come up with new colourways without realising that I'm doing it and therefore losing sight of my original plans slightly.
I'm not sure that this is a bad thing, as I really can only create in this way, but in the process I have discovered quite a large amount of insecurity that I didn't realise was there.
Usually I put some fabric combinations together and play with them, coming back to them over a stretch of time, until I really feel that they're working. But at the moment I don't have that kind of time and I'm just having to trust my first impression. Leading to me getting very excited about a colour combination for an entire day and not wanting to work with anything else, only to walk back in to the studio the next morning to huge doubts over everything that I've created the day before.
Which has in turn meant that there's been a certain amount of unpicking and deconstructing going on, only to sometimes sew it all back together again the next day when I've realised that it did work after all. Seriously.
And strangely enough, in my attempt to make the process more orderly, I've actually been feeling more disorganised about it all. Because instead of working on one product at a time, I'm working on one (or two) colourways at a time. So instead of getting to the end of the day and having 10 cushions finished, I've started two cushions, a playmat, three bibs and a cot quilt, all in one colourway, but finished nothing.
So it's all just a case of trusting the (new) process and trusting my instincts and hoping that it all comes together as a coherent collection by next weekend. And of course, focusing on enjoying it all and ignoring the little niggles of fear that are always present when I make something.
