London – Week 2

Hi again,

So week 2 of being with Amanda Kelly, this week was unusually slow but we got through it and learnt some new tricks. We had a 5th intern start who is also a student at Loughbrough University who is very lovely like the others.

On Monday it seemed like we had a million tasks to do and that we would be incredibly busy all week, with requests for repeats, colourways, colour separation, an order of fabrics arriving, invoices to be sorted, styling and many other tasks. I mainly focus on doing repeats now when they come in as it has been deemed I am the best at them (yay). After the first week of  doing repeat patterns I’ve quickly picked up a lot of skills in how to ensure they repeat correctly to the clients liking. I don’t mind doing repeats as I find it interesting and something in me is able to pick out repeat spots of patterns very swiftly so they never take long.

When we had finished all the immediate tasks for each day we moved on to overlocking and headering, new designs had come in printed on fabric  and we complete the presentation so they are ready to be taken to clients for sales meetings. There are 2 kinds of headers in house headers and freelancer headers. As I am the only intern who takes fashion I was one of the 2 given the task of overlocking the designs so they would stay neat and not fray in transit. However in the tiredness of a Thursday morning disaster struck, I accidentally cut a hole in the center of a striped multi pattern design. I immediately went and spoke with the head designer Ben who fortunately wasn’t angry at me. He explained that accidents do happen and I wasn’t the first to do something like this. Ben then demonstrated to me how we resolve such accidents so that the pattern is still presentable to clients and doesn’t diminish the pattern. Of course he did tell me to try and be careful when overlocking the rest which I was. When this happened I expected to be scolded and not allowed to do anything else with machinery however they were calm and not too fussed by the incident which relieved me. The main lesson I learnt here that I definitely need to remember when going into my third year is that mistakes happen, stay calm there will always be a way to fix them even if it involves a little alteration.

As I’ve now gone through invoices marking the files as sold, I’ve started to understand what a wide variety of clients the company sells to, how much pattern design is worth and what kinda of patterns sell best. It seems season to season some patterns apply throughout and others are seasonal repeats. Paisley and ditsy patterns always sell really well according to the designers so when we had a moment they got us to draw some ditsy’s, sketchy flowers and paisley pattern. My medical problems with my hands made drawing pretty paisley patterns really difficult as they’re drawn so smoothly, no feathered lines, bold but fast and this is something I can’t really achieve in the same way however I gave it my best and produced the patterns below.

In my personal life I also finished my book I’ve been reading called ”Friend Request” by Laura Marshall and if you’re looking for a good thriller to read this book is excellent! I could barely put it down and physically couldn’t if I hadn’t finished the chapter. The story is about a woman named Louise who one day has a notification from Facebook ”Maria Weston wants to be friends on Facebook” but Maria has been dead for more than 25 years…. hasn’t she? You can read the blurb in the photo below but I personally thoroughly recommend the book.

Hopefully next week I’ll have some interesting stories to tell but for now that’s all for this week.