Icica goes east side

I've been invited to take part in an exhibition about sustainable fashion taking place in NYC later this year. All super exciting - the exhibition "The Believers" is a creative project by La Fortuna Studio which aims to showcase cutting edge sustainable fashion..right up my street! It will run from 8th September to 15th October. Press release and more info to follow..

some work of late

Burberry Woman

some work of late

homage d'McQ

WGSN fashion awards

So plowing through the raft of emails now that I'm back and I have one suggesting I nominate myself for the WGSN "Most Influential Designer - Footwear and Accessories" award. Whilst I have a feeling this might be for more established brands if anyone feels like they might like to nominate me that would be rather nice!

Update

Apologies for a lack of posting but I took a few days off last week for a bit of rest and recuperation. Now back in London I'm working on new design work, learning new software and trying to work out what's next for me..

a dress you say??

Having a massive file clear out since my poor laptop keeps crashing, and came upon some old black and white photos I took and printed (hence terrible exposure) during my hugely fun art and design foundation course at Runshaw College (before doing shoes at LCF). It's of a paper dress which fell to pieces in the midst of our "shoot", and I love that I thought pinning bits of chiffon to a board stacked in research would make a good backdrop ha. I always fancied doing some crazy pleating with shoes though..hmmm!

Magazine Mayhem

Today has been absolutely manic as it was the complete and utter last day to get work published before industry night tomorrow. Following the fairly unsuccessful meeting with the dean last week we were trying to decide on the best course of action for those not selected to exhibit. With minimal time and resources, pop-up shops, new exhibitions etc were all vitoed and then I volunteered the idea of a mini magazine where everyone can submit work and we hand it out on the industry night. It seemed feasible if everyone put in £10 towards a budget, did a double page spread and bish bash bosh we have a magazine. I started a facebook group and people seemed keen, but then it seemed to backfire as the sunday night "deadline" passed and 2 people had sent me their work. I was fairly disappointed to say the least, but then on monday morning checked my inbox to find 7 new mails (all sent in the early hours ha) and sort of thought well maybe I should give this a go. Needless to say it hasn't been easy, through raises in budget (now £20 each), droppers out, last minuters, indesign nightmare page kerfuffles..but in the end I got it to the printers at 4pm today and will collect tomorrow. Not the best quality paper and could have done with more time, but certainly not bad for 6days! In the end there are 16 of us in, and we'll have around 100 copies to hand out on the night. I'm quite chuffed! Now onto my portfolio...sigh.

Open publication - Free publishing - More footwear

ladies and gentlemen there's been a delay...

Update: The show officially opens tomorrow (wednesday) to much excitement and in time for my family. Can't wait to see it now!!

Uni (London College of Fashion) have announced that our show is not ready (despite having been advertised as opening on the 28th June, i.e. TODAY for months) and are postponing the opening until - they don't know yet. Given that my family are coming to London especially this wednesday they better get their arse in gear...

got my day cut-out...

So after the trauma of all business card quotes being in the region of 200 smackers, I decided to take matters into my own hand and do a spot of improvisation. Ordering a last minute die stamp for £15 with my guy at studiotone (specialist stamp makers in the east end) I legged it from bethnal green (literally - no number 8 buses for the 30minute window of me needing to get there..tfl, i hate you) and rushed back to uni to use the press by 4.30 as it was last day of workshops. I managed to get there in time and after a couple of cut-outs rather than embosses, got the the machine set right and banged out 50cards. My pre-cut ones arrived the day after (typical) so rather than sunning myself today am busy cutting out these bad boys. You can so tell they're hand made by the odd wonky name and uneven pressure but I'm claiming that adds to the charm.

business card envy

In the midst of chasing up my business cards for the show and I found this beauty on the VIP print website which has me green with envy and trying to decide whether I should change mine now.

Alas not time really but this is the first portrait business card which I've really liked. So far my design follows on from my portfolio and shoe box with an emboss of my name one side, and black raised ink details on the back. Now not sure if that's overkill following this little number..hmm.

Now on Coroflot!

view my portfolio:
coroflot.com/helenfurber

Final Cut

So after much playing in after effects and having no idea about output of music and so on I had to submit my video for the LCF Showtime exhibition. I could carry on tweaking fade-outs/adding new bits for eternity so in the end just had to force myself to leave it, odd timings and all. Its 2mins(ish) which is a bit longer than I'd like but with the music now seems to run much faster. I hope it will allow people to understand the project clearly and quickly - who wants to be reading pages of blurb on why you're so sustainable - and also translate a sense of luxury and brand to boot. I'll let you be the judge..

Icica from Helen Furber on Vimeo.

Flip(ping) book

So I've bee trying to organise getting the construction part of my animation made into a flip/flick (whatever) book to hand out at the show. Why is it so damn expensive everywhere?! People seem to want near enough 10quid for each one, which considering it's a business card sized gimmick is not reaaaally feasible for me right now. I've chopped down the number of pages and am now looking into having to DIY it..(sigh) with business card "paper" and software called (you guessed it) "Flipbook Printer". This however doesn't solve the problem of binding and covers, which I wanted to be uniform with my business cards and lookbook paper, and which is a linen emboss effect, with my name (ie. logo) embossed in the front. Then there's the dilemma of whether to bind it at all - not so "eco" friendly? Or use metal screws which was my initial proposal for lookbook materal..but then surely that's even less eco (when metal screws are taken into account) though does mean pages can be recycled and screws reused. hmmm.

My Photoshop Effort

Flip Book Software

What it will look like (minus the nice front cover I WILL have)

Show Palava

I recieved news this week that I've been selected for the LCF 57 Carnaby St Exhibition which runs from 28th June - 14th July. This is obviously really exciting news, and I feel pleased and excited to be taking part. It has however been marred by LCF's decision to seriously cut the show capacity for students this year, resulting in less than half of all final year students from my footwear class being able to exhibit their final products, and without telling any of the students until less than 2 weeks before the exhibition opens. Needless to say we have an appointment with the dean of the college next week but I feel saddened to know that at present I won't be showing with my full class (as in all previous years) and my heart goes out to all those who have worked stupidly hard to make brilliant products which they won't be given the oppotunity to promote live. Fingers crossed we can organise our own show.

CS3 glee

So I've also been trying to teach myself the rest of the adobe CS3 collection now that I have a little more time and need to make a website etc. I now realise trying to make a fashion film was too ambitious given that I would have had less than 2 weeks to do it and have never done any film before, but I'm happy to have learned some new film skills in the region of animation. Having worked with the LCF digital fashion studio to create an animation (in 3D studio Max) to explain the construction of my shoe, I'm now trying to learn adobe after effects to add on all of the little finishing touches, and some musique. watch this space..

Icica from Helen Furber on Vimeo.

back to reality, almost

After my first beautiful saturday off and a mini one-day holiday down at hackney lido yesterday (!) I'm back to finalising all the little extras I'd like to have at the show. One of the key areas with this project has been finding easy and effective ways to communicate what is a non-conventional construction for footwear. I have the animation, which I'm turning into a business card sized flickbook at the moment, and what I also wanted to work on was an augmented reality business card. I met up with David Sweeney who freelances with the LCF Fashion Digital Studio last friday, and hope to be able to create something along these lines in time for the show. This would essentially be an augmented reality model of my pin bed and maybe wedge, which you can see when you hold up my business card/flickbook to a webcam. You then see the 3D model of the shoe on screen with yourself...how cool! Something like this...


David also worked on the first augmented reality fashion presentation with cassette playa last fw10/11 (where a symbol on the t-shirt of the models triggers an animation which plays on top of the model)..

CASSETTE PLAYA AW1011 - AUGMENTED REALITY from Amazing Grace on Vimeo.

shoot (me)

Yesterday was a pretty frought affair. After a meeting to finalise the animation for my product we had scheduled to have my editorial shoot at 7 in the evening but at midday the third confirmed model cancelled on me. So at 6.30 after an unsuccessful non-finish of the animation (going back today...) I headed off to topshop oxford circus in search of the face of my campaign. God bless topshop in all it's glory for there in the queue with a huge mass of bags and looking all pretty was mary, a norwegian 15year old on holiday, who after an initial moment of confusion agreed to come along (grandma in tow) and take part. 5 hours later following some precarious perching on a black glass box (made by my flatmate's own fair hand) and lots of yawning we had our shoot. And the rest as they say is history..Get the photos back today. The shoes fit her like a glove..I'm excited!

Uber Mega thanks to Natalie (my flatmate) and David (her boyf) who were stylist and photographer for my shoot.

streaking

So I'm well into developing my shoe designs at the moment and decided to take a break to explore development of print surfaces. I'm still loving Gerhardt Richter type colour mixing and would love to try and translate that into some form of printed textile/leather surface. I had a bash at some initial experiments on paper with acrylics. Next phase will be to experiment on a naked leather with some natural dyes and surface textures and see what I can come up with.

flash! oh ohhhhhh

So I've been busy trying to learn how to make websites over the xmas hols..not as easy as one might think. After much umming and ahhing and realising it was gona take a really long time to do it the way I wanted, I chickened out for the time being and made a wix. Real website (minus horrible advertising) will come soon..