What do Pattern, Textiles and Fashion have in Common in 2013?

Quentin Jones for Kenzo Pre-Fall 2012

You may have noticed that TSTG embrace animation and film narratives for textiles!

This is because textiles manifest time and story-telling in their very DNA.  Even digital code is textiles inasmuchas each pixel echoes the needlepoint stitch or punchcard hole in order to make the image whole.

Last year we showcased amazing textile animator Tania Grace Knuckey's witty, subtle and evocative textile animations at the Slow Studio Cinema. "I have to put timelines into textiles to bring them alive," she says.

Have a look through Quentin Jones amazing sequences and visit the Slow Studio on April 20th to see more of this inspirational genre!

Quentin Jones for Victoria Beckham 2012

Quentin Jones for Nowness 2012

Quentin Jones for Penhaligon 2012

Quentin Jones for Holly Fulton 2012

Happy New Geometrics Year!

Jonathan Saunders Animated, Emma Neuberg, 2012

Thank you for sharing a wonderful year and we look forward to more inspirational, ground-breaking and fun events in 2013!

The Slow Textiles Group Print Room Cinema Tania Grace Knuckey Premiere!

TSTG just had a wonderful Textiles Talk from award-winning textiles animator, Tania Knuckey, 

in the Slow Studio's Print Room Cinema!

Tania's vision is to bring dynamism to textiles through film-making and animation.

This a small snippet of one of her many amazing textile films being screened at the Slow Studio Cinema yesterday! This was the first public 'cinema' viewing of her film collection and it was sensational!

The next Slow Studio Cinema showing is Dec 1st where you can see a collection of Textiles in Fast Fashion movies! Come, SEE!

Co-created Virtual Patchwork by TSTG!

The Slow Textiles Group spent a great weekend inspired by Liberty's of London quilt-maker, Katherine May teaching hands-on fabric geometrics.

Then, following TSTG director, Emma Neuberg's instruction in how to convert these into digital animations, members of the Slow Textiles Group worked together on the first ever co-created virtual digital patchwork! 

Kate, Geraldine, Katie, Christina, Pennina, Manda, Red, Veronica, Emma, Susana and Tania thought they'd share this first incarnation of it with you here! This represents the first international virtual 'patchwork' animated and created internationally in an afternoon by top textile designers!

The workshop concluded with a series of textile animator, Tania Grace Knuckey's extraordinary, poetic, evocative and stunning textile animations in the Print Room Cinema! Much excitement, dialogue and future thinking was set in motion in anticipation of TSTG Geometrics Season: Symposium, Exhibition and Catalogue 2013!

The Slow Textiles Group and Vince Cable's March of the Makers Coming to You Soon!

The Slow Textiles Group spent a wonderful day today with Paul Smith, Margaret Howell, Brooks Brothers, Members of Parliament and the City of London livery companies and many other wonderful textiles professionals to help in the upswell of the Made in Britain campaign. Who says we don't have fantastic weavers, knitters, embroiderers, pattern cutters and printers right here! Vision, skill, passion unite!

Amazing Co-creation Workshop With Emma Neuberg, Katherine May and Tania Grace Knuckey on Nov 3rd!

Totem Blends, Emma Neuberg, 2012

Triangulated Patchwork, Katherine May, 2010.

Frame Sequence, Tania Grace Knuckey, 2012.

An amazing creative conversation opens up with the Slow Textiles Group on November 3rd at 2pm in the Slow Studio, West Hampstead, London, and internationally, online. 

The afternoon offers you a hands-on workshop where you'll learn to combine patchwork making with digital animation and film for a new kind of connected conversation whilst hearing the artists speak.

Booking details here. Places flying!

November 3rd at 2pm Animated Patchwork Workshop!

Who says patchwork is static!
For details of this amazing Slow Textiles Hands-on Workshop and talk with Textiles Animation Award Winner - TexPrint Space Textiles Winner 2012, no less - Tania Knuckey,  go to Transform Textiles into Stunning Short Films in Illustrator and Photoshop workshop (code W28) details here!

Jewellery & Fashion Unite!

Unite your inner jewellery and fashion designer with the fab People's Print, DIY Couture and the V&A next week!  This is a chance of a lifetime, book your place here!

The Geometrics are Coming! STG Presents a New Concept in Textile Design!

Camille Walala

Slow Textiles is Delighted to Announce the Launch of their Geometric Season!

Slow Textiles manipulate the lovely David Saunders' knitwear: d a v i d d a v i d

We are delighted to announce that over the next few months we are running a collective research project incorporating several Slow Textiles Group members dedicated to an exploration of the geometric form in textiles.

All our workshops, including those on May 19th, July 14th and November 3rd 2012 are dedicated to the theme as well as our exciting first group shows. 

Papers, essays and short films are also being produced on the subject, so watch this space or join us to get involved.

What do geometrics mean to you?

Wishing You a Merry Christmas!!

This Postmodernism at the V&A print is especially co-designed by Hatice Burgess, Pamela Schwartz and Emma Neuberg, members of the The People's Print's Born To Be Wild design group (the first co-design social textiles group) and experimenters in the future meaning, role and identity of textiles!

Slow Textiles Group Members Begin Planning the First Slow Textiles Film and Exhibition, Geometry Girls!!

Call for International Researchers and Assistants!!

Textile Workers, 

silkscreen print, USSR, circa 1923,

reworked as an animated print by Emma Neuberg, 2011.

If you're interested in becoming an assitant and or researcher with the Slow Textiles group, please sign up to our London 
October 15th 2011 meeting 
at 2.00pm (GMT+1) 
with webinar participation if you're not in town!! 


To participate, email!

As part of our on-going research as an independent satellite of the academic research group Textiles Environment Design (TED), we develop themes that build upon the Top Ten Sustainable Textile Design Strategies to take these forward collaboratively into an open access space that can help individual designers, artist groups and makers, at any stage in their development, think about their practice, its meaning, context, offering and promise.

One of several areas that we are looking at is the reanimation of historical textiles as a route to "Dematerialisation" (TED's Top Ten Design Strategy #9), reinterpretation, education and discourse and "Looking Back To Look Forward" (TTDS #6), as engagement tool to re-examine and re-evaluate textile systems, structures, values and observations that were once in place. These are just two of the TED strategies that we are engaged in!

Ours is an open source activity and you may join us directly by becoming an associate member (associate membership opens October 2011) or participating for free through Facebook's Comment and Share and the blog's Comments feature below each post.

This call for assistants and researchers is to further your work - practical and or written - and its direction within 'slow', social textiles and or the Slow Textiles Group platform.


On October 15th from 14:00 to 16:45 in person (see Contact Us for London location) or via webinar:

 A FREE Meeting for Future Researchers and Assistants of the Slow Textiles Group!

The beginnings of our trad/tech textile conjuncture

Japanese textile motif,

animated print,

Emma Neuberg, 2011.

Plus ça change

Summer Sales,
digital surface pattern inspired by Horace Taylor's 1926 poster,
Emma Neuberg, 2011.





Horace Taylor, 

The Electric Railway Company,
London, 1926


This is British designer, Horace Taylor's poster (animated by Emma Neuberg) encouraging women in the suburbs to get into town via the London Underground and "buy British"!

Taking a closer look at the ladies' hats (especially the one on the far right), and the designs on sale, they pre-date Nathalie du Pasquier's postmodern designs for Memphis by fifty years. (Not to mention nu rave).


Here they have been rearranged to create a digital narrative with history and humour. The experiments continue..



Summer Sales Circle,
digital surface pattern inspired by Horace Taylor's 1926 poster,
Emma Neuberg, 2011

Slow/Fast Experiments

Pastel and digital prints animated, 

Emma Neuberg, 2011.

Experiment 1: Slow Hues,
Pastel and digital print animated, 
Emma Neuberg, 2011.

Over the next few weeks, we are experimenting at the juncture where slow, traditional, hand processes meet fast digitised ones to stimulate dialogue on surface pattern and new hybrid forms. 


The aim, loosely, is to combine old with new, tradition with technology, in ways that offer new creative textile possibilities and textured digital forms.





Experiment 2: Slow Lace Hues,
Pastel and digital print animated, Emma Neuberg, 2011.




To see more examples of Emma's digital sketchbook go to
http://www.emmaneuberg.blogspot.com/

Electronic Fabric Experiments

Here at Slow Textiles we are experimenting with electronic fabric samples. 
It's playtime at the moment!

Flash View! New Work for Animated Textiles

Repetitive Triangles II,
Emma Neuberg, 
animated silkscreen print and plastic on paper, 
2011.


Emma Neuberg develops ideas for the next Slow Textiles workshop (taking place at the V&A in September and October). These mark an experimental phase inspired by bringing Italian design house, Memphis, into the digital age.


The initial objective is to bring slow hand processes together with digital crafting for online dissemination and 'new' meaning.


Repetitive Triangles II builds upon old textile 're-animations' that Emma created during the V&A Quilts exhibition last year:

Inheritance I,

Emma Neuberg, 

re-animated rayon, 

2010.