Soft Toys
Design: Kate Keeler
Client: Tiny Warbler
Date: 2010
Add comment August 25th, 2010
Textiles
Felt Wall and Room Divider
Design: Kathryn Walter
Client: Felt Studio
Date: 2008
Add comment August 22nd, 2010
Old Street Banner Shopping Bags
Design: Design HQ and Kettle Friendship Society
Client: Commercial Drive Business Society
Date: 2009
Almost every year the Commercial Drive Business Society prints 256 street banners to hang on Commercial Drive to create a colourful atmosphere for the neighbourhood. Eventually these banners are retired. In response to this, Design HQ had a great idea…transform them into reusable nylon shopping bags, with proceeds of the sales going back into the neighbourhood. As of May, 2009, by converting old banners rather than using new nylon fabric, this neighbourhood has avoided 11.8 tons of CO2 emissions, and avoided sending 301 kg of nylon to the landfill.
For more information click here.
Add comment May 5th, 2010
Hairstyle Pillowcases
Design: Heather McGaw
Client: Self initiated
Date: 2009
It may be a little late for last minute Christmas shopping, but as soon as you’re back in the black post holidays, I recommend picking up a set of Hairstyle Pillowcases by designer Heather McGaw. Sweet, playful and well illustrated (affordable too) what’s not to like?
-John Ryan
3 comments December 23rd, 2009
Stiched Postcards
Design: Mandy Milks
Client: Souvenir Shop, Motherbrand
Date: 2007
Milks is an artist and designer working in Toronto. She has always had an interest in traditional domestic arts like knitting and cross-stitching and in the more recent craftivism movements. The dominating factor in most of her work is creating contrast or paradoxes by blurring the lines between art and design and mixing unlikely materials or methods like embroidery on wood as in the case with these postcards.
Add comment December 12th, 2009
Untitled Totems
Design: Brian Jungen
Client:
Date: 2007
As he has already proven with his Nike masks, Jungen possesses an unmatched ability to transform unremarkable consumer goods into provocative work. Original commodity and final product may seem, at first glance, far removed from each other, yet they are integrally linked. No element of Jungen’s process is incidental to any other.
Here, the tubular forms and the pouches, pockets, zippers, accessories, and embellishments of the golf bags are converted into the bodies, faces, wings, and claws of creatures associated with Northwest Coast First Nations cultures. Wolf, Raven, Thunderbird, Frog, and Salmon emerge out of arrangements of circles, ovoids, and form lines, the basic components of traditional Northwest Coast design–and of golf bags too, apparently.
The references to golf immediately call up Oka-style conflicts between the beliefs of aboriginal peoples and the interests of non-aboriginal developers and leisure seekers. Like Jungen’s Nike masks, his poles allude to globalization, prestige commodities, economic disparities, and the disappearance of local and indigenous cultures into the maw of multinational corporations.
3 comments December 11th, 2009
Silkscreened (Reactive Dye) Textile
Design: Kym Monaghan-Morton
Client: Sheridan College
Date: 2009
Photo: Kitka design Toronto
1 comment October 20th, 2009
Cross Stiched Hockey Cards
Design: Meags Fitzgerald
Client: Crèche Exhibit
Date: 2009
Meags Fitzgerald’s installation, Crèche, in visits a simulacrum of her parents’ bedroom at the time of her home birth. The artwork addresses maternal lineage, the distortions of memory and personal history through materials.
1 comment October 2nd, 2009
Wooly Parking Meter Jackets
Design: Janna Maria Vallee
Client:
Date: 2009
Photos by Craig Sinclair
Via the awesome Yarn Bombing.
Add comment September 15th, 2009
‘Stag’ Quilt
Design: Grant Heaps
Client: Radiant Dark/Elegant Corruptions
Date: 2009
1 comment August 26th, 2009
International Women’s Day Hooked Rug
Design/Maker: Higgins, Flora
Date: 1975
1 comment July 22nd, 2009
Felt Armchair (with concept sketches)
Design: Kathryn Walter
Client: Felt Studio
Date: 2001
The Armchair was commissioned by Rachel Gotlieb as part of her “New Landscapes” at the Design Exchange in Toronto ON. The exhibit commissioned four artists/architects/designers to create pieces of furniture that featured and experimented with sustainable design.
2 comments July 15th, 2009