I was thinking a lot about what I wanted to do in terms of creating a small fabric collection from my current giftwrap collection. I thought back to my original ideas for my collection where I was basing the collection on a more sophisicated design for children. I ended up changing this to more appeal to the young mothers market as I found my designs were going towards an older market than children. However I do still think something about the designs could appeal to children and the parents that would buy for them, not in the giftwrap setting, but I do think the designs or a variation of them could be suitable for young girls summer dresses.
Fashion used to be a large part of my textiles journey, however as I discovered more of the interiors market and the stationary market that was not limited to the basic ideas I had for these, I started to enjoy working with them a lot more. I think the idea of aiming towards young girls, aged 5-10, would be interesting as I think my fabrics would suit well for summer dresses with their light colour scheme and cute insect patterns.
Two patterns from my giftwrap collection
I really like the ladybird design and as I had only used this for the gusset of my bag I felt like this was an underused pattern in my design, I think this could look very nice on a summer dress and I plan on trying it out as a CAD visual. I think the dragonfly pattern at present could be too dark so I need to try and lighten this up a little. I plan to digitally print these patterns onto fabrics, I need to look into what kind of fabric I want to use, at present I want to look at quite light cottons as I think it would be a suitable fabric for the dresses.
To show what the products will look like on the fabric, I plan to print two fat quarters.
The creation of my theme moodboard was by far the most time-consuming and thoughtful, I wanted to capture my thoughts in photographs, showing the journey from thinking of a normal everyday beetle to imagining it as a cute pattern on a child’s birthday wrap.
I decided to call my collection ‘It’s a Bugs World’, as it was aimed at children and I wanted it to be a cute watercolour style that would appeal to the children as well as the parents buying it. As my research indicates, I chose ladybirds, dragonflies and jewel beetles, mostly for their colour and shapes and what I think I could do with them. I think watercolours will be something I want to look into first for a style so I included some artworks that I thought fitted the ideas in my head. I also included some photos of marshlands where it is common to find the insects that had lovely compositions and colours in them.
My colour and texture board shows the colour scheme I have chosen from several images of particularly jewel beetles and their environments around them. I chose to have quite muted colours in comparison to the bold colours also present in some of the jewel beetles as I wanted to make this collection appealing to the intended market as a difference to some of the brighter designs we often see for children. I chose some textures that I would like to experiment with in terms of creating my own bark pattern to use as a faded background for a pattern perhaps as well as the leaves and the dots which relate to the dots on a ladybird. The dragonfly wings are also very pretty and intricate and I would like to experiment with this, they remind me a lot of a leaf skeleton too which I have photographed before so this might be something to try out in the photographic darkroom for a clear spacial print of the pattern.
My occasion board represents the children’s birthday I would be aiming the patterns at, I think this could make an interesting topic for me as I have not tried out patterns for the younger generations before, tending to stick to an age range closer to my own in previous modules. While this is still something I am interested in, I would like the challenge of creating for someone else as I think it would allow me to be more free with my designs, especially when it comes to watercolour. I have enjoyed working digitally in my last unit, especially with the use of Procreate on my Ipad which has been a very useful tool, but I also want to carry on with the more traditional media I have used for most of my creative career and also welcome Procreate to try a more artistic approach, using the various watercolour brushes they have available on there.
My customer board portrays the dual-market I am currently aiming at, the young mother I picture needs to be attracted to the designs to purchase them, whether its to wrap presents for their own children or for children’s friends to go to another birthday as my target of 5-10 year olds generally do not go shopping and pick out their own wrapping paper. I also need the patterns to be attractive to a child of this age, I think avoiding the bright colours could mean that I have a unique product in the market that stands out amongst the Disney theme for example. I have not yet determined whether this collection will be aimed at mainly girls or boys, I would like to try and make it appealing to both with my varied colour board, however this may be a decision when the patterns start as I will have a better idea of what the final product will look like.
Lastly, the competitor board illustrates what I feel my collection will be competing with. I chose middle range shops as I feel the designs tend to be more cute and muted, whereas the cheaper shops tend to go quite bright and bold with their designs. My research at Harrods was interesting but I do not picture my target market shopping at such high prices for children’s wrapping paper, I would certainly be narrowing down my market if I was to choose the luxury end over this middle ground.
Paperchase is quickly becoming one of the most popular places to splash out on stationary and quirky gifts and wrapping, they also have sustainable policies in place which I think is an important thing in an industry that could be considered wasteful. John Lewis and Next have a variety of designs that I think would suit children’s birthdays well, again using complimentary colours, Waitrose designs are a little more bold, but I was interested to see that they had an insect design as I really cannot find much in other stores. The giftwraps included in this moodboard retail from around 3.50 a roll to 6.00, with an average length of around 3m, which is not a bad price, but considering cheaper stores can sell 10m at even a pound or two sometimes, this is definitely in the middle of cheap and luxury, where in Harrods, a couple of metres on a roll was nearly eight pounds.
Overall I am happy with the design on my moodboards and feel much more confident about the direction my work will be heading, the trip to London definitely helped in terms of research images but I am currently in contact with someone at the Cardiff Museum hopefully to allow me to see into some of the archives of bugs, as even in London they did not have a vast amount out for viewing, and the ones that they did have out where quite difficult to view and photograph properly, presenting itself as more of an artistic structure than informatively showing you the different species on show.
Tahlia Paige 