PaisleyMake Design Festival
PaisleyMake is a new festival of creativity aiming to encouraging people to reconnect with the heritage and explore the future of textiles and design, in the original home of the iconic Paisley pattern.
Last week I was invited to the blogger preview of the event, which involved a tour of the beautiful Paisley Museum and it's huge extensive pattern archives within the fascinating environment of huge ancient weaving looms. In addition we had the opportunity to network with industry professionals and view exhibitions and participate in workshops from emerging Scottish fashion, jewellery and interior designers as part of Scotland Redesigned at Paisley Abbey. Finally, my favourite part, we attended an inspiring talk by former Glasgow student Penny Martin, editor-in-cheif of one of the industry’s most intellectual and informed women’s magazines, The Gentlewoman. I even sat next to her in the FROW!
The festival, consisting of four days of workshops across Renfrewshire celebrating the history of textiles within the area, and encouraging people of all ages to get creative, is part of Paisley's bid to become the UK City of Culture 2021. To find out more about this initiative, follow @Paisley2021 on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, and explore the #Paisley2021 and #PaisleyMake hashtags. I've been involved with Scotland Redesigned projects before and love what they do for the Scottish fashion industry, so I was thrilled that they have partnered with the town, and exhibited their fantastic members to the public in a contemporary, shoppable environment, and even the talented bunch from design incubator Fashion Foundry took part!
Sometimes, opportunities come my way as a Scottish Blogger that I feel hesitant they will be a) relevant to my blog, and b) actually enjoyable/interesting to me as a person. Nobody likes wasting their time getting dolled up for a disappointing event that often involves a lot of travel. Sometimes though, I take a risk and it pays off (big time), in this case, it was an invitation to the blogger preview at Paisley Make. Never having travelled to the small town on the outskirts of Glasgow, and not being hugely interested in textile heritage, I didn't expect much, but it turned out to be one of the best networking events I've been to, and super inspirational career-wise too, which is timely considering I've just started a new university course and I'm getting involved in some exciting new projects, so I'm feeling really amped up about my future in fashion! Stay tuned for a blog post all about The Gentlewoman soon!
