Design Dots

Alternative Christmas mug

Alternative Christmas mug

Mesmorising Video art favourites

Our recent Trip to New Covent Garden Flower Market…

Photography by Toby Summerskill

The Boats on telly

Our lovely retail partner in Singapore, Atomi has been featured on Japanese telly for their work with Gifu, a prefecture in Japan and they kindly sent over some images. Great to see the pieces in their store.

Thank you Andrew an Mitsuko!

The Boat at Andre Restaurant, Singapore

Style Living, Singapore

Topdrawer 2011

Rope colour requests for the Boat

any other requests?

English Breakfast

English raspberries, yorkshire tea and local flowers (and grapefruit, origin….. unknown). My kind of summer breakfast (not that I eat flowers for breakfast). I wish Summer could last forever.

I know twitter and facebook’s full of unwanted musings about what people have for breakfast but it was just so colourful and pretty. Have a brilliant summer, everyone x

The Boat process

For anyone interested in what goes into producing a new design, The Boat is quite an interesting one. Originally, it was designed to have a handle made from a wooden spoon. Little Miss Muffin style cup cake basket in bone china but it evolved into a rope handled china bowl/ basket.

From initial drawings in the sketchbook, a 3d version on a computer quickly came to shape. The producers in Staffordshire was unsure about the shape. Any new shape is extremely unpredictable in a kiln – you don’t know which way the clay is going to twist and turn. Upon showing the model maker the drawings, he hinted it might not work – it’s a large piece and he worried the high ends will collapse in on itself. It was a reasonable worry and I was lucky to have his advice and experience. A big risk but having decided to go ahead with it, we decided to lower the height and change the angle slightly to give it the best possible chance. You can see the difference in the original drawings to the finished product.

The photos below show initial drawings and the Boat in its clay stage. When it was finished in clay, it was cast in plaster to be tweaked ready for a mould to be made. The sheer size of the mould makes it a difficult job for the casters to do these by hand. A grown man can hardly lift it but the end results came out without problems. BIG sigh and relief!

In the end, a wooden spoon looked too lop sided and the idea of rope emerged. Probably from the vessel being nicknamed ‘The Boat’ by the makers.