Friday 20 December 2013

Phew, just finished another article, this time on trends

It's well past my bed time, but thats normal when there's an article to write and the deadline was yesterday.

As New House is pretty up-to-date on all things colour and trend wise, I often get asked to write these sort of articles. To illustrate it I've also been playing about with images that show how the designs in our roller collection didn't just happen by magic (although we do use quite a bit of that), but fit into the wider 2014/15 trends. these are a few of my images :

Brights :  in 2014 slightly artificial brights are key colours. Bubblegum pink, turquoise, tangy orange and glowing yellow are all strong colours in the NH range.

Craft Colours :  Temby braid by Laura Fletcher and our hessian fabric with pewter starfish pull.

Slate tones :  Deco braid, again by Laura (with a little colour influence from Melanie Darwin if I remember rightly), and Tea & Coffee roller print by Charlotte Farmer.   

There's more I could add, but I did say it's past my bed time.....



*    By the way, the central image comes from the Heimtex 2014 Trend book. They allow the press to download and use them for publication and they will appear in my article with credits. So I guess it's ok to use them here too.   

Saturday 14 December 2013

Go to Glasgow

I've often been to the outskirts of Glasgow, but never gone into the City Centre before - what a mistake eh?

I found Glasgow more fun, vibrant and amazing than I ever imagined. Everyone was friendly and I enjoyed every minute. I loved St. Georges Square with it's traditional fairground :

Unfortunately I was too full from breakfast to eat anything in the fantastic Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed Willow Tearoom on Sauchiehall Street, but next time I will :
I ended up at the Kelvingrove Museum that's famous for it's Impressionist and Glasgow Boys collections amongst many other things.
 
I loved Lowry's seascape  as it is so different to his other busy matchstick-people paintings but uses the same base colours.
 
The Kelvingrove has great sculptures too :
 
My favourite was a dog made from wellington boots that didn't just capture how doggy a dog is, but did so in the style of one of those African naïve sculptures that influenced Picasso so much :

The Spitfire strafing visitors was pretty good too :




The girls took some great images the other week....

Experimenting with the camera on their ipad, Melanie and Charlotte took some good images for our website on their ipad the other week.

The advantage is that they could see instantly what they'd taken, while my little Panasonic has a tiny scratched screen and I never know if my pic is any good or not until it's loaded onto a bigger screen. Mind you, they take a million times better pictures than me anyway :

These are just a few images, and M & C's photo session with their ipad will fuel our website for a little while to come. Maybe it's time I got an ipad too??