Ready to go and catch some inspiration!

My last post was about a new design called the 'inspiration catcher' satchel bag.  I finished it off today and its off to its new home early next week.  Never fear, this design can be made to order if you to want to catch some inspiration while you run your errands!

The hand-cut yellow design is made from kangaroo leather and the main bag leather is cow hide.

The straps are adjustable in length.

I picked out a cool 'around the world in 80 days' hot air balloon cotton print for this design.

xo Shelley

Inspiration catcher bag

The 'inspiration catcher ' bag was a design that came out of my love for geometrics and also thinking about the American Indian dream catcher - some of which are very geometric in their designs.  I currently have a collection in development for Winter 2013, and have been taking some of my inspiration from self portraits of world famous artists throughout history. 

 image source

When I started thinking about this bag design, I wanted a piece that could slot in with my Winter collection and through the merging of these concepts, the 'inspiration catcher' was born!

I have a customer to thank for getting stuck into this design so fast, because it really was down the list in terms of pattern making and development for Winter.  But when Nikki contacted me and asked if I would make a tan coloured bag with perhaps a different design, I sent through sketches of a handful of concepts and she fell in love with it.

This is the design sketch, from which I made my template for the leather cut out by scanning in and tracing over with illustrator and reflecting to get a symmetrical template.

Below you can see my computer printout, my card template which I did by tracing through with awl points and then drawing it in - a process which I found was far too similar to doing a difficult join the dots game!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all I have to post for today. The bag is still under construction, so I better go get back to cutting it out!

Will be sure to post the finished bag when its done.  If you too would like to pre-order one, email me at shelley@shelleyd.co.nz

Bye for now

GEO-BIRDS

Since the last post I was inspired by the little geo-bird pendants so much so that I was thinking non-stop about birds, their feathers, their colour anything about birds really!  They are such beautiful creatures and its often that artists and designers take inspiration from our feathered friends.

So I had been working on a notepad folio or compendium type of product and I wanted to do a finer bird cut-out.  I thought an interesting thing to share would be the way I came up with the cut-out.

So here it is.  The evolution.

 

I started with an illustration of a bird from an illustration book. I liked this bird's pose so I chose this lucky fellow. Then I split up the bird into shapes, refined it, and then created a card template. I then traced it to the leather and used a knife to cut out the shapes. Its pretty long winded and fine work, but I can do this with pretty fast turn over as apposed to getting it all set up and cut by a laser-cutting firm.

And the finished product:

I'm not finished thinking about birds yet, there will be more to come I assure you.