Rosie Dog Design

Hello and thank you for visiting Rosie Dog.

I am currently updating and changing my website. A long overdue and challenging task but something I have wanted to do for a while.

The shop pages will be closed for a while, whilst the shop has a refresh. You may however message via instagram or email if you haver any queries.

Best wishes

Lorraine x

Summer gives way to autumn and the most dramatic and glorious changes occur

About Rosie Dog Design

My name is Lorraine and I am the designer behind Rosie Dog Design. I trained as a printed textile designer at Winchester School of art and have worked as a freelance textile designer for both fashion and interiors since that time. I also work part time as a technical instructor at a university teaching textile design, art workshops and Adobe software.

I really enjoy working with students but my passion, love and hobby are surface design. I spend a lot of time out and about looking and recording ideas that I can use in a design. I still freelance, selling designs to the fashion industry, which challenges my drawing and technical abilities, but also allows me to be experimental and diverse in my style. You never stop learning as a designer or as a teacher.

Rosie Dog Design began in 2017 as part of a project for my Masters degree looking into professional development. I wanted to create something that would showcase my designs.

There is a wonderful quality to silk, it is luxurious and exciting to print on, giving the colours vibrancy and life. Ochre yellows can look like gold on silk, which adds a surprising element to the designs. By creating scarf designs, it is my hope that people will buy with care and chose a design that they will want to keep and treasure for a number of years.

I love colour and my influences, although very broad, definitely stem from Indian, Islamic and African art and textile designs, nature and architecture. All my designs are hand drawn or painted, which is beautifully replicated by digital printing, allowing me to recreate my designs in the same broad colour palette that I use in my art work.

The collection is gradually expanding to include art prints, cushions, table cloths and fabrics by the meter.

All of my products are digitally printed in the U.K and hemmed or sewn in the U.K.

Digital printing uses similar dyes to screen printing processes to produce beautiful, vibrant, permanent prints but there is less wash off so the process is better for the environment. I have also sourced GOTs certified organic cottons for my tables cloths, cushions and my interior fabric range.

I am only producing very small batches of scarves so the production costs are quite high, but by investing in a good silk scarf you are buying a piece of art, which you will be able to wear for many years.

Lorraine x

Kefalonia’s wild flowers and dramatic scenery was the direct inspiration for one of my scarf designs

So, why are silk scarves so expensive?

Pure silk is a natural, rare and expensive fabric that is mainly produced in China and India by a method known as sericulture. Silk has been in production in China since between 5,000 and 3,000 BC and didn’t reach India until 140AD. The silk Road as it was known enabled merchants to travel and export the beautiful fabrics which became a luxurious commodity but it also enabled people to smuggle silk worms from China to India. The majority of silk is produced by a particular moth larvea, Bombyx Mori, which produces the silk thread to create it’s cocoon, before morphing into a moth. The cocoons are boiled and the silk is wound onto reels. The reels of fine silk thread is woven. There are a number of silk weaves available that are very different from each other, Habotai is a very light fabric, Shantung silk is almost paper like with a matt, slubbed surface, Twill is a heavier weight silk with an obvious weave structure and is used by a number of scarf companies. I chose to print on medium weight 100% Silk Crepe de Chine, which has a particularly soft feel against the skin and a beautiful drape.

The fabric is shipped to country in which it will be printed made in to saleable products such as scarves and clothing.

Silk takes dye extremely well, to produce beautiful vibrant colours, and also has often has a beautiful sheen that makes colour glow and reflects light onto the skin.

My scarves are digitally printed in the UK with designs that I have painted by hand and are then digitised to enable them to be printed. Digital printing applies traditional fabric dye to the fabric but is less harmful than traditional printing methods because there is far less wash off of harmful dyes and chemicals into the water system. For me though the digital printing enables me to recreate my artwork with all the tones and gradiants that it contains.I am always thrilled by the quality of the printing when my scarves arrive from the printers.

Where do your designs come from?

I am mainly inspired by the natural world, particularly plants and flowers but I really enjoy travelling and seeing different architecture, art and I am always fascinated by how colour reacts in different light. Blue can look quite cold in English day light but nearer the Mediterranean, it glows.

Unfortunately I can’t capture the magic that enables that to happen but it hugely inspires my work. I love colour, it is very important to me to use colour in my work.

My recent visit to Charleston House has also had a huge impact on my colour ideas because the house has been hand painted by Vanessa Bell who used hand mixed colours. With an artist’s eye she created a colour palette, which works beautifully in English light and in a cottage with low ceilings and small windows. The colours are heavily textured when you see them in real life, it wasn’t something I had appreciated when I had seen photographs. It is the texture that gives the colour life. The garden, is well worth visiting too, the planting is exuberant and full of colour combinations that are staggeringly beautiful.

I love travelling and I try to be disciplined and take drawing materials wherever I go, but I will always have my phone at hand to take hundreds of photo’s. Even if I don’t use those drawings immediately, they become an important resource of inspirational material that I can revisit and use at a later date.

Is a silk scarf good for your hair?

Apparently because silk has super smooth fibres there is less friction on your hair, which causes less frizz and damage to your hair. By all accounts silk and satin are particularly good for people with curly hair. I have thick hair and I have found also that silk hair scrunchies do stay in my hair very well, where as I would have expected the to slide off and I am experiencing less hair breakage that with a normal hair band. Sleeping with a silk scarf on your head or using a silk pillow case is said to protect hair from damage.