intern

Hawthorne & Heaney on Florence Sargent’s Sampling Project

September 11, 2019 by Intern

by Abi Tominey-Smith

During her time here, our last intern Florence Sargent visited the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2019 for her research project, where she was briefed to create a sample based on the Summer Exhibition including 3D aspects. She became increasingly aware of how much reference there was to the animals of the world and nature throughout the art. This year the colours were bold and capturing and this was something Flo wanted to reflect when it came to sampling.

At the exhibition, she began by taking photographs to capture her favourite pieces, most of which included animals with an unusual look or aspect to them – bright colours and interesting faces. This sense of the individual and different, she has taken through to her final samples.

Mach Brothers, EASY TIGER, 2019.

Christopher James, MACAW, 2019.

Caroline Piggott, UK FISHING RIGHTS, 2019.

After visiting the exhibition and writing a blog post about her time there, Flo began her development by creating lots of drawings. She has created some really beautiful and realistic work using only pencil and shading.

To develop further Flo began to turn her flat drawings into 3D artworks, using stitch alongside cutting and joining techniques with glue and tape. These gave her work more of a 3D focus and gave her some ideas as to how she could put together and join her final piece to include these 3D effects.

Flo moved on by adding in more character, using bold colours combined with her 3D style, and experimenting with mediums such as paint, pen and pencils mixed together to give her work a bit more life.

Then when it came to actually beginning the sampling process, Flo decided to start with a simple line drawing plan, laying out all the techniques and shapes to be included when it came to creating. This really helped her final piece come together as a success.

You can see here, she has decided to combine 2 of the most popular animals seen at the RA, a fish and a bird combined, to create her own fantastic creature.

Finally Flo took both the Goldwork Beginner and Tambour Beginner series of classes and learnt the basics of both practises. With some time blocked out for her during the weeks at Hawthorne & Heaney, she was able to practise and build on these skills to create her final pieces.

Goldwork was the first class Flo took part in, so this was the first technique she became comfortable and practised in, and is how she became so skilled at putting together these samples in such a short amount of time. Alongside, she also tried her hand at a smaller tambour sample to practise these skills further.

Overall I think Flo has really captured the fun, bright, wildlife inspired themes seen in this years Royal Academy exhibition. You can see the progression through her work and that she has really taken the time to think and plan out what she aimed to archive. This has resulted in these stunning final pieces, full of life and many embroidery skills!

Image Credits:

https://www.countryandtownhouse.co.uk/culture/review-royal-academy-summer-exhibition-2019/
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/summer-exhibition-2019
Own photographs of Flos work, at Hawthorne & Heaney.

Hawthorne & Heaney inspired by the Making Memory Exhibition

April 21, 2019 by Intern

At the start of last month, we posted a blog by our intern Kiah from her visit to the David Adjaye’s Making Memory Exhibition. Taking inspiration from this, she produced a series of drawings from the elements she found inspiring. With her drawing style being quite graphic, she favoured the staircase elements of Adjaye’s designs, bringing in the play fo the light and shadows on the stairs as you can see from the drawings above.

These were then translated into a repeating CAD embroidery design which she embellished with a variety of techniques that she has been practising from the classes taken at the London Embroidery school

These can be seen in the addition of the sequins at the top and bottom:

There is also the clever use of some very neat satin stitches in stranded cotton

And the more specialist raised cutwork bullion squares to finish it off

We also asked Kiah to show us how she imaged her textiles being used within an interiors context, so she produced these lovely visualisations of her work as used in a hotel or luxury office space.

Hawthorne & Heaney: Internship Opportunity Available

September 18, 2018 by Natasha Searls-Punter

Hawthorne & Heaney is currently looking for an embroidery intern to join us for an immediate start.

We are looking for a current undergraduate fashion/textiles/costume student to join us in the studio for a 3 month internship. Duties will include machine and hand sewing, general administration, maintenance of the social media sites, research, assisting with embroidery preparation for both the staff and for the School and errands. Time is also set aside from duties to develop your own embroidery skills during your internship. Applicants must be hard working, versatile, enthusiastic, professional, responsible and able work well in a small team. Attention to detail is a must along with patience as nothing in embroidery is particularly quick.

Specific Needs

Sewing skills are essential, and a proficiency in both hand and machine sewing would be ideal.
Computer knowledge of both MAC and PC, ideally with an understanding of adobe programs and G drive
Trend aware
Looking to gain experience in a live studio in the embroidery sector
Must be a current undergraduate student of a fashion/textiles related course
Able to travel into London every day

This internship is unpaid and should be taken in addition to a current undergraduate course, we are therefore unable to accept non students for this position. Hours are full time, Monday- friday 9-5pm.

If you would be interested in furthering your studies please fill out the attached form.

Elsie Wong (Former Intern) with her sample work

Hawthorne & Heaney: Intern Projects

August 30, 2018 by Natasha Searls-Punter

Hawthorne & Heaney has been very fortunate to have a series of wonderful students who come to the studio as interns to learn about the industry and experience a working studio. But what do they actually do while they are with us I hear you ask?

What they work on day to day is very changeable but for our longer term interns we like them to have a project of their own ongoing whilst they are with us. The gorgeous images you see here are from our most recent intern, Elsie Wong who was working on some floral motifs for us along side her other duties.

She draws on her Singaporean heritage and Central Saint Martins experience to bring her clean yet delicate style to these pieces.

She then went on to translate one of the pieces into embroidery using one of the techniques learnt in her classes at the London Embroidery School, specifically Limerick Lace.

Here is is presenting her final piece to us demonstrating the design process from design, to draft, to embroidery. I’m sure you will agree, great job Elsie! What do you think?

If this has taken your fancy and you would like to join us as an intern, please see the internships blog or jobs section of the website for application as we are currently looking for someone to join us for an immediate start.

Hawthorne & Heaney, Short Internship Available

August 13, 2018 by Natasha Searls-Punter

Sample by Charlotte Pearson

Hawthorne & Heaney is currently looking for an embroidery intern to join us for a few weeks in August 2018. Usually we only take internships of 3 months or more but we have a short period when we are looking for a little extra help between the 20th August and 7th Sept.

Duties will include machine and hand sewing, general administration, maintenance of the social media sites, research, assisting with embroidery preparation for both the staff and for the School and errands. Applicants must be hard working, versatile, enthusiastic, professional, responsible and able work well in a small team. Attention to detail is a must along with patience as nothing in embroidery is particularly quick.

Specific Needs

Sewing skills are essential, and a proficiency in both hand and machine sewing would be ideal.
Computer knowledge of both MAC and PC, ideally with an understanding of adobe programs and G drive
Trend aware
Looking to gain experience in a live studio in the embroidery sector
Must be a current undergraduate student of a fashion/textiles related course
Able to travel into London every day

If you would be interested in furthering your studies please fill out the attached form.

Elsie Wong (Former Intern) with her sample work

Hawthorne & Heaney on our Dress Making Project

February 9, 2017 by Natasha Searls-Punter

In the studio we like to continue to challenge ourselves and push to create something new with our skills, so at the end of last year, we set ourselves a bit of a challenge to create a dress to wear to the BTBA Festival Dinner in February.

Like with all create processes, it started with some sketching and sampling to decide what style we were going to go for.

We look at both hand embroidery and machine embroidery options, and given the time scale, decided it was best to go for a machine embroidery design which combined a few of our favourite techniques.Using an exisitng pattern, we tweeted the patternt to better fit the design and the body on which it would fit by toiling with the help of our intern Jessica.

Once we were happy with the pattern, we construced the skirt and began applying the embroidery to the flat skirt and top panels.

Along side the main production we also produced some technical samples to deal and test some of the more tricky aspect of this piece, for example, doing a test to insert a sip to see how close to the embroidery we could go because of the stifness of the backing supporting the fabric and the height of the padding under the stitches.

Once all the embroidery was finished, it all went back to Jessica to make it up.

Design/Embroidery by Natasha Searls-Punter and Pattern Cutting/Toiling by Jessica Eykel at the Hawthorne & Heaney Studio