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Hawthorne & Heaney Events presents… Monogramming @ Farah Vintage

June 20, 2014 by Natasha Searls-Punter

The Hawthorne & Heaney team have been busy making themselves known again this weekend by getting out and about with the public. This event was with Farah Vintage, a very well established mens wear brand, in their Covent Garden Store. Farah Vintage was established back in 1910 in Texas making blue chambray shirts for 35cents! The Utilitarian functionality of their items made them popular with the 1970’s Mod culture, an aesthetic that can still be felt today in their collection. This connection with music has been consistent as they have been sported by bands such as Pulled Apart by Horses, Bombay Bicycle Club, Editors and many more.

In honour of Fathers Day, our team was furiously embroidering personalised initials onto shirts for those who wanted to add the personal touch to their gift. The Farah customers were willing to be quite individual about their monogramming, choosing interesting placements for their initials along side the traditional cuff position. Our embroiderer used the traditional transfer technique to apply the design, then works into the shirt on the frame free hand. You can see the stages of the process below:

Stay posted to see where we pop up next!

The London Alumni Polo Team

June 11, 2014 by Claire Sarah Barrett

Recently, we have been working on an unusual side project that we thought we would share with you. Our director, Miss Claire Barrett has dusted off her equestrian skills and taken up Polo with the London Alumni Polo Club. The subsequent addiction to this rather dangerous new hobby has led to Hawthorne & Heaney sponsoring the London Alumni Polo Team.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the sport, it is a game on horseback, with four players on each team hitting a hard ball with a wooden mallet to score points. Polo is always played right handed and each game is divided into periods called ‘chukkas’, seven minutes long. Players wear a helmet, white trousers, boots, knee pads and of course polo shirt of the teams colours which is where Hawthorne & Heaney stepped in to help!

Machine embroidery is not something that H&H does very often but when we do, we do it well. The logo is digitized piece by piece by our inhouse machine embroiderer relying on her London College of Fashion training in a computer drawing program similar to Illustrator. This then gets uploaded to the CAD/CAM machine to be tested multiple times through the sampling process until it is perfect before it is applied to the shirts themselves. The gentlemen are sporting the full Hawthorne and Heaney logo while the ladies have a more delicate H&H version proudly worn on the right arm. Both logos centre around our soon to be famous Hawthorne tree.

Below are the London Alumni Polo Team in Chantilly modelling their new shirts with the large and small H&H logos on the arm. We like to think that we were integral to their sucess at the event where they took away two trophies !

London Fashion and H&H

June 4, 2014 by Natasha Searls-Punter

Hawthorne & Heaney always watch the emergence of new fashion graduates with great interest and feel its very important to encourage young designers in order to propel fashion forwards. Over the last week there has been plenty of new talent coming through and this talent has been displaying a range of extremely innovative embroidery. Starting with CSM and RCA and working into graduate fashion week there has been plenty of techniques on display.

Olga Kuryschuk displayed a delicate silver and white collection, with lace applique and a swathe of crystals strewn across the garments in a nonchalant manner.

Amie Robertson and Richard Quinn opted for bolder, structural applications of large shaped sequins or floral pieces for a more 3D effect.

While Flora Cadzow incorporated fine machine embroidery into her sheer fabrics.

London is always such a haven for young designers because it is so open to embracing the experimental, innovative and the quirky. Therefore finding new and exciting ways to present embroidery and reinvent old techniques in fashion gives is very exciting and challenging. In the past, we have had great fun working with emerging designers, like these graduate may go on to be.

We work with the designer right through from the initial idea, translating drawings into embroidery during the sampling process, development, placement and finally the realised products in production. In collections past we have worked with designers such as Isa Arfen, Reem Juan, Sibling, and Claire Barrow just to name a few.

Free Falling Crystal and Bead Tassels from Isa Arfen

Delicate Silk shaded body suit from Reem Juan

Islamic Inspired floral goldwork cap from Sibling

Fully couture beaded dress from Claire Barrow

Being a London based studio, we provide a more inclusive approach to embroidery for fashion as well as being able to modestly boast 15 collective years of industry experience. If you have an idea about some embroidery that you would like to have done, but don’t have the capacity to make it happen, contact us and we can see what we can do to make it a reality. For more examples of fashion embroidery by Hawthorne & Heaney, have a browse of our pinterest board

Hawthorne & Heaney Events presents… ‘Heads Up’ at Liberty London

May 27, 2014 by Claire Sarah Barrett

Internationally converted department store, Liberty London has just run a hat and headwear promotion called ‘Heads Up’, for which Hawthorne & Heaney provided monogramming services on its first day. Featured in ES magazine as shown below, the promotion features lots of big names in Headwear such as Eugenia Kim, Jennifer Behr and Awon Golding. This continues Liberty’s reputation for innovative promotions to encourage traditional skills and interesting brands. Following the success of our monogramming event at Liberty with Liberty scarves and MiH jeans last year, it is exciting to push the expectation of where you would find monogramming, not just on shirts and handkerchiefs but to jeans, hats and more!

For Wednesday afternoon and evening, we had one of our expert embroiderers stationed in the heart of Liberty, creating these tiny monograms into the rim of hats from the collection. A lovely way to add a subtle but personal touch to a distinctive item or to make a gift extra special.

The monogram is hand drawn, and transferred onto the ribbon in the traditional way before being meticulously hand embroidered. The method hasn’t changed for quite a number of years to say the least so it is a very low tech process, perfect for fascinating spectators as they can watch the letters form stitch by stitch. It’s great to see peoples reactions when they see the skill that goes into adding these little touches. Below you can see the frame and equipment used and a little fancy needle work from our embroiderer showing off her satin stitch.

And here a few examples of the finished articles!

Natasha SP @ Hawthorne & Heaney

Internships with Hawthorne & Heaney

April 30, 2014 by Claire Sarah Barrett

We at Hawthorne and Heaney feel quite strongly about the importance of embroidery education and passing on theses skills that would otherwise die out quite rapidly in the digital age we now live in. The days of sitting down to do something with your hands are becoming rarer and rarer and although we relish in the simpler and slicker processes that our iMacs and DSLRs bring us, we still very much cherish the time stepping away from the screens and sitting down at the frame.

Because of this, we try to encourage people to take up or expand on a skill such as embroidery and learn it simply for the love of it. Our sister company, The London Embroidery School, has quietly been trying to do its bit to maintain the survival of traditional embroidery skills such as tambour beading and goldwork by offering classes at a variety of levels. These techniques have gradually been dropping off the embroidery syllabus as now the majority of textiles BA’s don’t teach them anymore and over the past few years, several well known embroidery degrees have been removed altogether which is a very sad reality.

In response to this issue, we feel that it is very important to help students who already have an interest in the field to experience what it is like in an embroidery studio by offering short term internships. For us, it is great to have new blood in studio, to get fresh ideas and opinions and to add to the wealth of experience that we have as a team. For the intern, its a great way to see the processes that take an idea through to an embroidered piece in a real business context and understand how a studio functions. Along with the usual advantages of creative internships such as industry contacts, references, learning on the job etc. specialised internships provide the student with an understanding of the specialised skill. In such a niche area as embroidery, it can be hard to know what to expect as there is not a lot written on the matter and there aren’t an abundance of opportunities to dip a toe in the field. Therefore we feel that internships should have some taught time to act as a bridge between studies and industry along side the interns other duties. Having tried this out with our last few interns, setting aside a morning a week in which they can just work on their hand embroidery skills with the staff present and the open offer to attend any of the London Embroidery School Classes during their internship provides some time just for improvement of their own skills, giving them a little more than just saying that they worked here at the end of their time with us.

As a former intern of Hawthorne and Heaney and now an employee, I can confidently say that internships are very important and valuable to the students that are hungry enough for them and the business. Interning has has quite a lot of bad press over the last year or so and it can be a very competitive market where you feel like you are just turned over as another intern in the mill. But equally, i think it’s fair to say that if those who work hard to try and set themselves apart from the masses of students with a wealth of experience and skills, then they’ve really doing all that can be asked to be in the best position possible.

Natasha SP

For more content from us find us on Facebook or Twitter @hawthorneheaney

MARINA & HASAN

January 9, 2013 by Claire Sarah Barrett

First off apologies everyone for our missed post last month. As you can imagine things get a little frantic in the studio before Xmas and we got a little snowed under !

One of the very exciting things we were up to was this project for designer Hasan Hejazi. We were asked to create baroque inspired tonal cut work for three bespoke luxury evening dresses for pop goddess Marina from Marina and the diamonds. The project included some exciting names including Tim Bret Day (Photography), Thomas Knights (Film) and a suit for the designer by London tailor Gresham Blake.

Our designs and drawings were based on victorian florid ornament something that is very good to translate to cut work. You may have seen some previously in our work for the SIBLING bespoke hats last season. The initial designs and refining took a long time and the annotations and notes for the embroiderers even longer as there was so much detail involved.

The embroideries were executed in cutwork in colours to match the dresses with a fade to either lighter or darker. There were also a few crystals scattered about to add a bit of light.

The dresses were then put together over four days ready for the photo shoot.

Before the event we hadn’t seen any of the dresses, so we were very excited for the launch. The first we saw was the full length red piece which marina wore for her performance at the beginning of the night.

She then changed into the blue knee length dress which is our personal favourite !

The final pink dress was saved solely for the photo shoot, which you can see in the photos below. It was lovely to get a chance to flex our cutwork drafting muscles this thoroughly, so we are very grateful to Hasan for getting us involved ! A wonderful project all round.

SIBLING

January 9, 2013 by Claire Sarah Barrett

This year saw an incredibly exciting first for British fashion…… London Collections Men! The week started on Facebook with our menswear clients posting pictures of themselves with HM Price of Wales who opened the weeks festivities. Some were better than others …..

Hawthorne & Heaney of course jumped in with both feet and sponsored menswear label SIBLING for their gold work embroidery !

Another quick turnaround saw H&H producing Islamic style goldwork to be applied onto hand made base ball caps. The millinery was produced by internationally renowned milliner Noel Stewart. Juxtaposed against this H&H also produced and alternative goldwork for the collection in the way of provocative ANTI and PRO gold work text, which the brief told us was inspired by the london riots.

I appreciate that this blog was intended to be purely about embroidery in fashion but I really would love to point out SIBLINGs incredible work with knit ! Sequined knitted balaclavas came down the catwalk along side huge woollen head pieces and oversized sequin sweaters !

Since we have known them SIBLING have always pushed the boundaries of technique and we are really looking forward to working with them again this season on their womens collection !!

CLAIRE BARROW

January 9, 2013 by Claire Sarah Barrett

We all know how important education is, but few of us know how important fashion graduates are for setting the seasons trend in fashion. The final push is over and most have handed in for show selection. In my recollection this may have been the most stressful day of my life. This years GFW will be attended by all the head honchos in the fashion industry, talent scouts, bloggers and journalists and is the best way to get your career in fashion off the ground ! Not that it is needed for Hawthorne & Heaney’s latest darling Claire Barrow.

: Photo Matt Writtle

Claire Barrow is a 22 year old fashion design Graduate. During her compulsory year out at Westminster University Claire was supposed to take on an internship like most fashion design students. Internships are a valuable way to learn about the industry and I myself do endorse them very highly, but some cannot afford them or like Claire have more creative ideas on how to spend their time out. “I wanted to do something else, I was into my illustration and watching a lot of films starring bikers and punks with band names scratched into the backs of their jackets and the two came together some how”. Whilst waiting for some part time bar work to ‘come along’ Claire bought a leather jacket from a charity shop and began painting on it.

She then posted the image on her tumbler and Facebook and it was seen by Vogues fashion editor Francesca Burns and Mel Ottenburg, who was styling Rihanna for her Loud tour. Rihanna has gone on to buy two more leather jackets and she has just finished a capsule collection for the luxury label, Joseph.

Hawthorne & Heaney were lucky enough to work with Claire on her graduate collection. After being brought together by Robert Leach a tutor, who has had the pleasure of teaching many of the young upcoming stars in London, Claire worked on creating the full colour pattern pieces for the fully beaded dresses and head pieces in her collection. She then brought them to Hawthorne & Heaney where they were translated into tambour beaded panels with hanging paint drips off the exposed edges. After nearly two weeks of stitching from up to five embroiderers the panels were completed and totally blew us away.

We thoroughly enjoyed working with Claire and our other students this year and wish them all the luck in the world.

The combination of skilled craftsmanship and a young innovative design is something that H&H is very passionate about and supports with our young designers sponsorship scheme.

Keep your eyes peeled at Graduate Fashion Week beginning 10^th June. www.gfw.org.uk. With thanks to the Evening Standard and Matt Writtle.