Day 5 at the Victoria and Albert Museum #LDF14 #LDFredesign

Almost ready! The love seat waiting for Charlie to put the casters on.

Here's a close up of one of the finished front crochet legs. Except for the blue bit at the bottom and the pink at the top where she did increase and decrease the number of stitches in places, Kaja shaped it by simply changing the size of the crochet hook as needed and using yarns of different weights. It's small but it was a very time consuming piece of work, especially as she had to figure out how to mould the transition from round to square to achieve a snug fit. The yarn is from Knit with Attitude, an independent wool shop in Stoke Newington that specialises in eco-friendly and fairly traded yarn.

Below, Charlie and I lounging on the finished chair for a moment, after it was wheeled into the auditorium just in time for our panel talk at 4pm. 

The quality of the pictures below isn't great as they were all quickly taken on a mobile, but I think this one shows how hard Charlie worked to get the love seat ready for the talk. It is flanked by the Wood Grain Blue chair on the right, and you can just about catch a glimpse of the (still unfinished) chair I collaborated on with Kyla McCallum of Foldability earlier this week.

Below, us three collaborators, from left to right: Sophie Thomas of The Great Recovery, me  and Lucy Mortimer of Galapagos Designs, as we are getting ready for our talk. The atmosphere was very relaxed and we had quite a good discussion with our audience afterwards. 

I started off the talk by tracing my creative journey from capturing the raw photo material in Reykjavik earlier this year to the making of the repeat that is now on the love seat. Below a partial view of the images of the houses that came together in my repeat pattern 'Rekki in Reykjavik' for the love seat. As I explained in my talk, I also launched 'Rekki in Reykjavik' as a home wares collection this week to recover my cost of our LDF event. It will become available on my website at the end September.

In her part of the talk, Lucy Mortimer detailed the 10kg waste that had come from two of our 'circular economy' chairs (pictured below). She applied these numbers to a high-quality, expensive three seater, which needs to be reupholstered once in about 12 years. By juxtaposing this to a cheap standard sofa with a material life span of just about 2 years, she arrived at about 10-15kg of mostly recyclable or compostable waste in comparison to about 320kg of bulky waste going to landfill in the same period of time. Her example impressively drove home the difference between the low price the consumer pays for a cheap standard sofa and the true costs of waste management and environmental impact that society as a whole has to pick up for this kind of sofa.

Sophie Thomas, last but not least, talked about the Great Recovery's visits to waste management sites and got us all shaking our heads over the absurdity - in this age of growing environmental awareness - pictured below: 'do not reuse' unapologetically imprinted in all-caps on a piece of electrical equipment.

This much for today. If you happen to be in London today or tomorrow, do pass by at our live workshop at the Victoria and Albert Museum's Learning Centre on Level 3. 

You can read more about our event at the London Design Festival events web page and our hashtags for the week are: 
#LDF14 #LDFredesign

Ella

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Day 4 at the Victoria and Albert Museum #LDF14 #LDFredesign

It's been the 4th day, and I am excited as we are back to my key piece for the week, which we hope to have complete before our talk on Wednesday at 4pm in Seminar Room 3, just a few steps down the hallway from our open workshop at Level 3 of the Learning Centre of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Galapagos Designs' Charlie with his staple gun, ensuring the tension is good along the back, before we add the final backing, a beautiful blue corduroy that I have died myself, like all the other corduroy on this chair, as I couldn't find the colours I wanted anywhere.

Above you can see how my design mirrors itself for each side of this 'love seat', and the  yellow and coral corduroy on the sides.

And below my favourite bit to finish the whole sofa off: the wonderful work of Kaja Kippenberg, who is part of my company, for PR and communications - and in her words "knits to relax!" In this case she has been a whiz with her crochet needles and her maths to ensure this 'leg warmer' fits like a glove ...

.. and wait until tomorrow when we show you the final final finishing touch!

Or, if you happen to be in London this week, do pass by at our live workshop at the Victoria and Albert Museum's Learning Centre on Level 3. We'll be there all week, showing, telling, making ... 

You can read up on our event at the London Design Festival events web page and our hashtags for the week are: 
#LDF14 #LDFredesign

Ella

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