University project Guest Blog

Being a Nottingham lass I was thrilled to have the opportunity to use Sauce & Brown as inspiration for my final design project at Northumbria University. I was excited to talk to the guys at Sauce and Brown as they are inspiring to learn from, I was amazed by how the company works, these lads have so much experience and knowledge for fashion and how the fashion business runs. Being able to hear from them, let me see how an upcoming small local company developed in the fashion industry. The brand believes in quality over quantity, only stocking 100 items of each design, but their biggest aim is to bring back quality goods to Nottinghamshire, which is personally why this company stood out to me, we don’t have many good quality shops in Nottingham who stock handmade or locally sourced products. Shops don’t think local and many don’t design with local community in mind. So being able to be apart of designing t-shirts for Sauce and Browns spring/summer18 collection was a big deal for myself.

So a little about myself… what makes me as a designer, I believe I have the same morals as the company. I believe in bringing back little local businesses, as you are supporting a dream not only a business but a life. I am very vintage inspired and enjoy researching into historical eras such as the 1940’s & the 1950’s. I like how people in the 40’s took their time with their things and put effort into making do and repairing items which put a personal touch into the things you owned. I love handmade local products and enjoy letting my creative mind flow. I feel my dyslexia makes me cautious about my abilities but it makes me determined to develop to my utmost potential. I’ve always had an interest in fashion design from school right through to university, it has been the only subject I felt I succeed within. When I first started, my outlook to designing was very different to how I see myself today. I don’t class myself as being a menswear designer either I like to be able to design for both sexes. I also like to challenge myself to push boundaries to learn new skills and develop myself as a designer.

Old time boxing and traditional tattoos inspired my project for Sauce & Brown, I feel this project that I did at university has been one of my favourite projects with it being so close to home and having personal influences. I felt these two themes play a big part in our community, there were many more themes I could look at to get my inspiration for the project as our community maybe small but has a lot to offer and people don’t realise that if they look around they’ll see how inspirational Nottinghamshire is. We have lots of history that can be researched and create influenced ideas.

To me boxing is a big part of my family history. And I was lucky enough to find old photographs from my granddads boxing club ‘Saxons’ which my dad and family members attended. My Grandad was the one who encouraged me to go to university. It was nice to see these images as I had never seen them before and I feel researching from photographs is the best way to find inspiration. I also wanted to reflect boxing in this day and age, so with a little help from Neil Huntley who runs Revolution Fitness in Sutton- in- Ashfield I was able to take photographs for my research. Getting Neil to box and spa with other members of the boxing club I was able to get poses to draw from to inspire myself for my prints.

Going forward with my research I wanted to build a style within my drawing techniques and knew that tattoos linked well with my chosen theme, being able to go into a tattoo shop in Kirkby-in- Ashfield and see LB tattooing over an old school tattoo that had faded gave me inspiration towards mark making and testing print ideas for my research. It was also interesting to be able to see his collection of tattoo guns and see the different designs and shapes they came in. I wanted to create an old school style print that had a modern twist. Sketchy continuous line drawings of my own boxing gloves became a nice way to link the sauce and brown typo in with the prints, which I was able to develop my Photoshop and illustrator skills and I feel this project has helped me to work on my confidence with using CAD software and learn how to create prints.
I also liked how I was able to use simple print techniques like screen printing, which I wasn’t given much access to use at university as I was mainly a pattern student and didn’t take print, so being able to see my work being printed onto fabric as a sample piece was a successful feeling to have.

I was excited to have the chance to base my university project on Sauce and Brown and was even more excited to be able to show my work to Andrew and Anthony. It was really nice to hear honest feedback from fresh eyes that hadn’t seen my work before; they are so friendly and really inspiring to talk to.
I look forward to working on future projects with the guys at Sauce and Brown and would like to thank them for letting this Nottingham lass have the opportunity to learn from them.

Watch this space

Chloe Dionne brown