Hi all,

     For university for my placement year I have to keep a blog. This is said blog where you can read updates on how I’m getting on, on my various placements, the things I learn and whether I’d recommend to other students to do a placement year.

    On the 1st of October I started my first fashion internship at Amanda Kelly in London and I’m going to be here until the 14th of December. Amanda Kelly is a print design company, they work with many clients across the world and produce a wide range of beautiful prints for garments and other items of the clients desire. For my internship with Amanda Kelly I had to uproot and move to London in order to get to and from work everyday. This for me was incredibly hard as I pretty much spend all my time with my boyfriend at his house and now I’ve moved a 2 hour drive away from him. However I couldn’t miss out on the opportunity to work in London even if its only for 2 and a half months.

   I learnt rather quickly living in London, the tube is the way to travel long distance and rush hour tube travel isn’t as scary as it sounds. On my first day at work I smoothly traveled to and from with no stress or worries about being late. Once I arrived I was introduced to the 3 other interns, one from a uni in Manchester, one from Loughbrough uni and the other a graduate from Japan. After all the introductions and tour of the office it was time to get to work. First task of the day, learn how to transfer sold pattern files to those who had sold/purchased them. This wasn’t very hard, all the files are well organised and easy to search through then I would simply upload the relevant files and transfer them to the correct clients using a website called ”WeTransfer”. Once all of those had been sent off I just needed to organise the emails so other interns and staff wouldn’t get confused therefore redoing a task that had already been completed.

    My second task was significantly harder however as I needed to edit a pattern to make sure it would repeat smoothly. This made me rather dizzy rather fast as it was a very small geometric print with hand drawn flowers over the top, hours on end of staring at this trying to make it line up correctly makes you go rather light headed. Many of the clients I corresponded with wanted their prints to be in repeat so I feel like mastering taking sections and editing patterns to create a flowing repeat print will become of great use to me.  After speaking to another intern who studies textiles at university, she showed me how you can reveal all of the file showing cut off parts of patterns making it significantly easier to edit them into repeats. 

I did these tasks again and again for the duration of the week with new patterns being sent back to be made into repeat tiles. Eventually me and the other interns ran out of tasks to do and got told we should draw. We weren’t told anything specific to draw so I chose to create a geometric graphic flamingo repeat pattern. I thought if i created a simple pattern then in any spare time I could practice putting patterns into repeat, how to colour separate and how to create different colour ways. For the files I was given to edit I didn’t need to colour separate or create colour ways, however I know I will at some point need to know how to do both so hopefully the other girls and designers will help teach me how.

At the end of the first week I was very lucky to have a visit from my lovely boyfriend and had him stay for the weekend.  We went out exploring London and chose to visit the Natural History Museum. The architecture of the building itself was beautiful and the exhibits inside fascinating however I didn’t like the taxidermy animals so much as they rather scare me. My boyfriend being him insisted on trying to get into my photos at the museum which made me laugh. Overall I’ve had a great first week in London and I can’t wait for the next 10.