About

The Weave Shed is a website for weave designers with a portfolio practice, payee, mills, independent, designer makers, tapestry, artists, educators and students. The site is funded by The Worshipful Company of Weavers and Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, University of The Arts London. The contents are compiled, collated and edited by Philippa Brock and Eleanor Pritchard. Website design and build by Colin Buttimer.

The Weave Shed is a resource site, providing a portal to available weave resources on one site alongside an active blog featuring weave-related stories, news, up and coming events and featured weavers. We’re a community site and encourage all users to participate in its growth. The information here is from the professional UK weave community and the editors.

We welcome all relevant input from users: for feedback, suggestions, information to be added or updated for the resources pages and for weave-related blog features. All contributors to resources pages will be acknowledged on the site and links to their own online resources added where possible. We also have future plans to develop pages for weave-related historical & cultural studies and a newsletter and we welcome any suggestions.

 

About us

Philippa M. Brock. MA (RCA)

Philippa is the Woven Textile Pathway Leader at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, an international woven textile researcher and designer/artist with a portfolio practice.

Her practice lies in CAD/CAM woven jacquard. Her work ranges from researching and developing SMART woven textiles through to designing trend packages, woven textile swatches for the textile industries, a member of the Textile support committee for the St. Paul’s Cathedral design and replacement vestment project and exhibiting textiles. Pieces of her work from her ‘Self Assembly’ series for the science/art project: ‘Nobel Textiles’ projects have recently been acquired by the Crafts Council for their permanent collection.

Philippa’s research/design practice pushes the boundaries of what is possible within the field of CAD/CAM (digital) 3D woven jacquard textiles. It involves exploring the full potential of the industrial power loom weaving method, creating ‘finishing’ effects on the loom, relying at times on serendipity to advance new ideas. Initial prototyping is developed on hand looms. The process is also reliant on both old and new yarn developments and exploring unusual combinations of woven structure interactions.

Links:

Eleanor Pritchard

Eleanor Pritchard designs and produces dobby woven fabrics. Techniques such as double-cloths and colour and weave effects are used to achieve gently patterned fabrics, with a palette which draws on mid century English painting – soft chalky colours with unexpected accents.

Eleanor is particularly interested in traditional British fabrics and textile crafts such as Welsh double-cloths and tweeds, and much of her work is a reinterpretation of these traditions for a contemporary context. She produces an annual mill-woven blanket collection, which is sold throughout the world. UK outlets include Margaret Howell, Liberty and Fortnum & Mason.

In addition to her mill-woven range, Eleanor has also undertaken a wide range of commission-based projects. Recent projects have included a large-scale stitch and paper installation for museumaker at Orleans House; a collaborative paper and light installation for Canary Wharf; hand-woven vestment fabrics for Ely Cathedral; atrium screens for the National Trust Central Office, and woven lengths for Christian Lacroix Couture.

Alongside her own practice, Eleanor is also an associate lecturer in weave on the BA Textiles course at Central Saint Martins.

Colin Buttimer

Colin graduated from Middlesex University in Fine Art in 1995. His early work included slow-motion video projections and digital photography, and his practice has since evolved to include writing, music criticism and web-based media. He has written about improvised, experimental and electronic music for The Wire, Jazzwise, Grooves, Signal to Noise and e/i , and online for the BBC, milkfactory, Perfect Sound Forever, Absorb and All About Jazz. He co-founded Hard Format, an online archive that celebrates cd, cassette and record design in the face of digital distribution. He has also developed a large body of digitally post-processed photography that represents a concerted attempt to wrest the magical from the everyday. A broad range of Colin’s activities are documented on www.eleventhvolume.com. He is Web Manager for Central Saint Martins and works as a freelance web consultant/designer/writer. He can be contacted via eleventhvolume (at) gmail.com.

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