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Irene Blanco is a pattern designer from Madrid, Spain, who has just created a new brand called La Lloronita. Irene designs patterns ,ceramics, bags, scarfs and also transforms spaces through interior design. Her main inspiration sources are Mexican and African folklore. Their colors and passion for life, is the source of energy and inspiration in Irene´s work. In fact, The name of her brand La

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Something else I discovered in Totnes was the Cornish label Seasalt. The business was founded in Cornwall 1981 but it wasn't until 2003 that they began to design their own exclusive prints. Their patterns feature lots of boats, Cornish flowers, and Seaside themes and are created in-house by designers Sophie Chadwick and Laura Watson. The colourful designs are put to good use not only on

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Claire Brake spent  many years successfully managing a chain of designer boutiques in London, but decided to leave the hustle behind and headed, with her dog Pandora, for the calm space of the Dorset coastline. From her studio she designs and makes a collection of fashion accessories, using fabrics featuring her own unique print designs. Under the label Esme & Esme Claire's collection is

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When you go to the library or the bookshop what do you like to carry your books in?

Over the last few year’s I’ve been lucky enough to gather some gorgeous book bags, courtesy of various publishers giving them away at stands at book conferences and other events:

When I asked on Twitter for more examples of great book bags I got sent some lovely, envy-inducing photos… Thanks go to Anabel Marsh for the photo of her lovely Kelpies bag:

Kate Wise tweeted me this picture of this lovely Usborne bag:

David Maybury sent me a reminder of his happy past:

Melanie from Library Mice sent me a photo of these beauties:

Sarah Yewman is the lucky owner of the Julia Donaldson/Axel Scheffler Bag and the Shifty McGifty bag:

Amrita, @ghazaldesk, sent me this photo of a Dutch bag, from the American Book Center in Amsterdam:

If you’ve a particularly loved book bag (whether from a publisher or not), do let me know – I’d love to see more great examples! You can email me a picture on [email protected] and I’ll update this post next week.

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Designer Rosie Moss exhibited at New Designers in London last week as part of their 'One year on' showcase. Rosie graduated with an MA in Textile Design from the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design in 2013. Since then she has produced a wonderful range of textile prints on bags, cases and cushions which she sells online here.

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It's Friday and that means we sit back and enjoy some design work simply to admire its beautiful design. Today its all about Finnish design firm Marimekko where we are looking at tea towels, fabrics, bags, cushions etc. So scroll down and enjoy the vibrant colour and fun designs. It is a bank holiday here in the UK on Monday but dont miss Print & Pattern on Tuesday when we go into full Surtex

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This is the beautiful work of Anna Pernilla a designer and illustrator from Sweden where she trained at the HDK School of Design and Crafts at the University of Gothenburg. Anna works in visual communication with a particular passion for illustration and pattern design.

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the new domestic is a homeware line "designed for domestic living 2.0" and they hope to combine functional utility with effortless style. their first line of products are heavy weight recycled cotton canvas tote bags with screen printed patterns. all bags have a diagonal pattern on the back for a two-in-one look. this season, they're celebrating the triangle – using one basic shape and creating a

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By Ulinka Rublack

I will never forget the day when a friend’s husband returned home to Paris from one of his business trips. She and I were having coffee in the huge sun-light living-room overlooking the Seine. We heard his key turn the big iron door. Next a pair of beautiful, shiny black shoes flew through the long corridor with its beautiful parquet floor. Finally the man himself appeared. “My feet are killing me!”, he exclaimed with a veritable sense of pain. The shoes were by Gucci.

We might think that these are the modern follies of fashion, which only now beset men as much as women. My friend too valued herself partly in terms of the wardrobe she had assembled and her accessories of bags, sunglasses, stilettos and shoes. She had modest breast implants and a slim, sportive body. They were moving to Dubai. In odd hours when she was not looking after children, going shopping, walking the dog, or jogging, she would write poems and cry.

Yet, surprisingly, neither my friend nor her husband would seem very much out of place at around 1450. Men wore long pointed Gothic shoes then, which hardly look comfortable and made walking down stairs a special skill. In a German village, a wandering preacher once got men to cut off their shoulder-long hair and slashed the tips of the pointed shoes. Men and women aspired to an elongated, delicate and slim silhouette. Very small people seemed deformed and were given the role of grotesque fools. Italians already wrote medical books on cosmetic surgery.

We therefore need to unlock an important historical problem: How and why have looks become more deeply embedded in how people feel about themselves or others? I see the Renaissance as a turning point. Tailoring was transformed by new materials, cutting, and sewing techniques. Clever merchants created wide markets for such new materials, innovations, and chic accessories, such as hats, bags, gloves, or hairpieces, ranging from beards to long braids. At the same time, Renaissance art depicted humans on an unprecedented scale. This means that many more people were involved in the very act of self-imaging. New media – medals, portraits, woodcuts, genre scenes – as well as the diffusion of mirrors enticed more people into trying to imagine what they looked like to others. New consumer and visual worlds conditioned new emotional cultures. A young accountant of a big business firm, called Matthäus Schwarz, for instance, could commission an image of himself as fashionably slim and precisely note his waist measures. Schwarz worried about gaining weight, which to him would be a sign of ageing and diminished attractiveness. While he was engaged in courtship, he wore heart-shaped leather bags as accessory. They were green, the colour of hope. Hence the meaning of dress could already become intensely emotionalized. The material expression of such new emotional worlds – heart-shaped bags for men, artificial braids for women, or red silk stockings for young boys – may strike us as odd. Yet their messages are all familiar still, to do with self-esteem, erotic appeal, or social advancement, as are their effects, which ranged from delight in wonderful crafting to worries that you had not achieved a look, or that someone just deceived you with their look. In these parts of our lives the Renaissance becomes a mirror which leads us back in time to disturb the notion that the world we live in was made in a modern age.

Ever since the Renaissance, we have had to deal with clever marketing as well as the vexing questions of what images want, and what we want from images, as well as whether clothes wear us or we wear them.

Ulinka Rublack is Senior Lecturer in early modern European history at Cambridge University and a Fellow of St John’s College. Her latest

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I have two new barkcloth messenger bags in my new shop now. I think these are the last I'll be making in this style. I kept a smaller one for myself... I wish I had more of that print!
It's a charming country scene with houses, a church, a mill, a farmer's field, a forest and an orchard. Quite a lot for one print, but the simple style and limited colour scheme really ties it all together!

This is the second bag made with a tropical barkcloth.
This is the last I have of that print as well... I often find fairly small pieces of barkcloth but luckily just a little goes a long way.
Can you imagine, most of these pieces of barkcloth used to be curtains!

Coming up soon, I've cut out lots of fabric for some Sweethaven bags, and finished sewing up the first one. It's a combination of red and pink fabric with a white doily applique.

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Lots more things have been making their way into my shop!

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Meet my brother, Guy Latulippe. He’s a garment designer who has turned his full attention to designing some amazing bags, purses, and totes.

When a wise and talented friend remarked on the fact that bags transcend size and shape of body, a new course was set. Inspired by mythology, super-heroes, music, mechanical systems and the wonders of the natural world, my bags are artisanal pieces, that are part of a collection. The bags are to be considered part of the wearer’s ‘armor’ elevating one’s sense of confidence as one sets out into the world.

His attention to detail and passion for his craft have always impressed me. Whether it’s his Pursonalities handbags (above), his impressive messenger bags, or his take on Christmas stockings (below), his creations always turn heads.

Visit his Etsy shop, or stalk him on Facebook, and send him some internet love.

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Posted by Luc Latulippe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: bags, Design, Etsy, fabric, Fashion, purses

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Good morning world.

If you want to watch selected highlights of the me-and-Amanda HousingWorks gig last week (which raised 10K for HousingWorks, hurrah), Spin has them up at http://www.spin.com/articles/watch-amanda-palmer-neil-gaiman-live-nyc. (I read "Feminine Endings" aloud for the first time, and I think it works aloud, which makes me happy.)(Also one of my favourite "I Google You"s)

So the last two weeks of madness is over and I am starting to look around and hoping one day to catch up.

Chicago was fun, in a strange, sleepless sort of a way. I got in on an early in the morning plane, sleepily left my garment-bag behind on the plane (my assistant and Maure Luke made this better), had planned to spend several hours working in my hotel room on the speech. But the hotel room, when I got there, was already occupied, and the morning got stranger from there, which meant that my acceptance speech was rather more impromptu than I had hoped, but people liked it.

It had been Decided that I wasn't doing a signing afterwards, something I thought was a bit disappointing when I learned about it. But I crashed shortly after, slept through both the Chip Kidd and Ivan Brunetti panel and the Chris Ware and Lynda Barry one that followed it, woke in time to have dinner with Jill Thompson and her husband, Brian Azzarello, at Katsu.

Breakfast with Chip Kidd, who got to look at the first copy of Who Killed Amanda Palmer, and said nice things, and then to the airport and off to Toronto.

I dined with Mark Askwith, who I have known for 22 years. We met in Gotham City -- literally, on the set of the first Tim Burton Batman movie -- and I would like to say that we have not changed, but we're both mellower and more contented and less spiky than we were then. We were both journalist-explainer-connectory people who loved comics and wanted to write them, and although he would write some comics he went one way, into television production, and I went the other.

Next morning I went off to CBC to record The Hour. In the car on the way I was told that they'd decided the night before not to do an interview but instead to have me read off a list of 5 Crap Superheroes. I looked them over. They weren't funny. I asked the producer about it, when I got there, and wound up rewriting them, very fast, so they weren't quite as not-funny as they had been, but I'm not sure they ever made it all the way to funny. Then up from the deep basement to a radio studio where Sook-Yin Lee interviewed me for Definitely Not The Opera about fathers and sons, and it wound up being one of the most real and personal interviews I've ever done.

The downside of being interviewed a lot is that people ask you the same questions a lot, and you wind up saying the same things over and over. Sook-Yin wanted to know things nobody had ever asked, and that I was happy to talk about. It goes out on the 20th of June.

The Luminato event was really fun and fine. Mark Askwith introduced me. (A quick google found a review of the event here , another with more photos here, and Mark Askwith's blog, with his introduction, here.)

My favourite event was the next morning: I went to Nelson Mandela Park school. I read to the kids and answered their questions, then I was shown around the school and finally was taken to a room where thirteen small actors portrayed scenes from the first chapter of The Graveyard Book. It was delightful.

In other news: Duncan Jones's film MOON opens tonight in LA and New York. I saw a preview back in February and loved it. Really good SF movie of the kind nobody makes any longer.

I have been nagging Mitch Benn to set up an internetty sort of place to sell his songs directly for a year or so, and he now has it at http://www.corporationrecords.com/store/index/104. Please buy music from him, so he does not feel it has been a waste of time.

The Graveyard Book -- and this Blog! -- have been nominated for British Fantasy Society Awards: http://www.locusmag.com/News/2009/06/british-fantasy-award-finalists.html

Here's a New York Times article about the CORALINE musical and the way it uses diferent kinds of pianos. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/theater/07Blan.html

This came in from Mike Berry:

Neil -- Congratulations on the "Coraline" musical. Thought you might be interested in this video of Schuyler Rummel-Hudson retelling the story of "Coraline." Schuyler has a brain malformation that inhibits her ability to speak, as recounted in her father Robert's excellent memoir, "Schuyler's Monster." Still, she's a remarkable storyteller in her own right.

Here's the link:

http://www.schuylersmonsterblog.com/2009/06/storyteller.html

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A really nice person helped me with my web site clean-up by installing the peek-a-boo posts for me. Now, if you like the summary of what might be a long post you have the choice to either continue reading, or move on to the next post. The peek-a-boo posts also offer bloggers an opportunity to post more material on their title page each day. Because, I'm a complete techno nin com poop, this blogging buddy rescued me and you, my readers, from long title page posts! Can you guess who this friend is....





It's Sandee from Comedy Plus!

In addition, I'd like to thank google for my very first ranking! Now, I feel like a real webmaster; a member of the google team, and that's something to celebrate. That is thanks to friends like Sandee, my best bud Christy, from ChristysCoffeeBreak, without whose blogging tips I would have be lost long ago. I've been real lucky in these first months of blogging, to have these friendships, in addition to many others not mentioned here. I hope you know who you are. Thanks for offering me a helping hand and putting up with my silly questions and antics each day.
This day, like all the special days we celebrate, would not be possible without the help, encouragement, and love, given freely by my friends. Thanks to all of you I'm having a great year!

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