ALICIA ANDREWS
Still think embroidery is a craft only limited to village tea mornings for the elderly? Then think again - Alicia Rose Andrews and her work are here to blow your needlework assumptions out of the water. We sat down to quiz her on her unusual choice of medium.
Out of all the other artistic mediums out there, what made you choose to work with needle and thread? Coming from a fashion design background, I am automatically drawn to texture and I think an illustration created using thread and fabric can often be much more inter- esting and more beautiful than a pen and ink drawing.
You say you have a love of all things airborne – how did this start? I remember reading James and the Giant Peach when I was younger, and imagining it being pulled through the sky by all those birds. So I suppose it stems from that really. I love the look of those old fash ioned flying machines, hot air balloons, blimps etc, especially the ones that look like they would never actually be able to fly. I remember when I was younger seeing those people selling all the helium filled balloons at fairs and wondering how they didn’t just fly away!
Where did you grow up and what was your childhood like?
My childhood was great, my parents took me on loads of holidays and I visited lots of places in England. They always encour- aged my creativity, and they have their
own businesses too, which can probably be partly attributed to why I am where I am today.
There is a sense of ‘freedom’ and individuality to your pieces – do you just find it easier to produce each to a looser, more flexible design, rather than following a rigid design pattern? Yes, I find it much easier to produce each piece without a template. If you do a drawing and then trace it, somehow the traced image never ends up quite as good as the original, it loses some of its charac- ter. It is the same for embroidery. I make my images by using the sewing machine to draw with, a bit like a motorized pen or something. Stitch length and density vary so much more when the embroidery isn’t stitched over a pre-dr awn image, its very subtle but makes all the difference to the final outcome. A sewing machine goes so fast, sometimes you have to just go for it.
You studied Fashion Design at university - do you still plan to pursue a design career? What are your feelings on your university experience?
I studied womenswear at the London College of Fashion and I didn’t really use
my embroidery skills until it came to my final year where I used it to embellish a collection I produced. University taught me the fundamental foundations I need to be a fashion designer, like technical pattern cutting skills and how to cre- ate colour palettes and put collections together. I definitely want to utilize these skills in the future by incorporating my embroidery into a fashion collection. Since graduating I took a course in lingerie construction and have all the designs and samples ready to create a collection, which I want to do early in 2011.
How do you like to gather ideas? As a creative, do you keep a sketchbook, blog or journal, or perhaps another form of collating ideas and experi- ences?
Lots of my ideas come from the things I read, rather than from an image, and there must be at least 200 notes on my iphone where ive thought of something to research or a design idea that I need to write down. Im constantly scared of forgetting an idea I’ve had so I always have to write it down. The next stage for me is normally to go and search for an image, which connects to the one I’ve got in my head, and then use this to
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