Recently

Hello we cropped up onto a few press recently and wanted to say a huge thank you to Embroidery Magazine in the UK, French magazine étapes and Habitus magazine for including and sharing our work with their readers.

You can read a short interview on the Habitus blog and some photos of our workspace. We talked to Jo Hall at Embroidery magazine which is published by the Embroiderers' Guild about our process and how we got started in embroidery. You can see some of the spreads below. It was a real pleasure talking with Jo, thank you for such a great feature!

Desktop Magazine "Neue Folk"

The November issue of Desktop magazine is out now and includes a feature on us as well as a special embossed front cover of one of our embroideries commissioned for the issue. The issue is called Neue Folk and looks at traditional skills and techniques used by designers today. We're very honoured to be included in the issue and share pages with some of our favourite artisan designers such as Will Edmonds and Hannah Waldron.

The cover went through a couple of versions and we must thank Bonnie Abbott for her input who pushed us to experiment more with the analogue glitch effect you see on the front cover. We played around with a similar illustration style for our recent Maps exhibition collateral but with this graphic we really wanted to create a glitch effect with the overlapping patterns and intersecting threads. We've colour mixed in our fabric based embroideries in the past but it was a real challenge achieving a similar effect on paper. Maricor worked on a few tests and luckily came up with a solution that we were both excited with. The bottom three images are detail shots of the physical embroideries showing some of the overlapping stitches we used to create the colour mixing.

The magazine also features an embroidered masthead and shows the front and back of the designs. The issue is available now at newstands/bookstores. Thank you also to Heath Killen, Desktop Magazine's outgoing editor who originally commissioned us.

Twins and needles

If you're based in Australia you may have noticed a pair of similar looking faces peering at you from the Sydney Morning Herald on the weekend, and that would have been us! There was a bit of a write up on us ahead of the West Elm Australian launch this week.

We designed a limited edition tote bag to help celebrate the opening of West Elm along with Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn and Pottery Barn Kids at a custom built space in Bondi Junction. The design will be translated to a limited run of tote bags that will be given away during their grand opening. We're very excited to be involved and were over the moon when the lovely ladies at Baker asked us if we'd like to collaborate on a custom embroidery, not only because it was an exciting project but also because yay West Elm was coming to Australia. The grand opening is this Thursday. We moved house last year and i've been in major nesting mode since so this could be dangerous!

You can read the article online here

ADC Young Guns X

Maricor and I were selected for this years Young Guns award which were announced earlier this month. The Young Guns is an international portfolio based award presented annually by the Art Directors Club and is open to creatives under the age of thirty. This year 34 were given and we're beyond happy to join alumni we very much admire and are inspired by such as Kyle Bean, Deanne Cheuk, Johnny Kelly and Alex Trochut to name just a few.

We weren't able to make it to the awards night that were held in New York earlier this month but our friend Matt was kind enough to snap some pics of our work on display.

London. Perfect summer one day, rainy winter the next..

Hello, sorry it's been a while between posts. We had some alarming news last week concerning the flat we just rented that had us distracted and anxious for the whole of last week, but I think (and i'm trying not to relax too much in case I jinx us) that everything is going to be ok now. It was a fairly black week and I'm so glad we had some friends to talk to here and back home otherwise I don't know how we would have coped. When the dust settles we'll be able to shed more on this as I think it will be very helpful information for anyone planning to move to London and are looking to rent a place here.

Ok so with that yuck news aside, Maricor and I are very happy to be able to share some of the new work that has kept us busy since landing here. We were commissioned by ESPN Magazine to create an embroidered piece of typography. Each issue they commission an illustrator or designer to a unique GoPlay graphic. For ours we extended our family of Sweater Letters, in the next few days i'll be able to post up some of the process work behind this project. And hopefully soon we can share more information about the other commissions we've been working on. There's another music lyric that's currently en-route to the framers back in Sydney as well as another set of Sweater Letters that are almost complete.

We're also been heaps excited to be featured in a few magazines lately, Freehugs Magazine from Russia and Nice Magazine an online magazine created by Nicework studio in South Africa.

In this issue of Freehugs Magazine we were asked along with Bratislav Milencović, Alex Trochut and Teagan White to discuss hand crafted typography and its relevance today. Although each of our styles and approach to design is quite different, it was interesting to see that our motivations seemed quite similar. We all like to develop details in our work that draw the viewer in, desiring to create type that communicates something more than letters and words.

The third issue of Nice Magazine features our work alongside a bunch of amazing creatives including Coralie Bickford-Smith and Serial Cut. You can download all three issues here for free.

Bottom image: Freehugs Magazine spread, image on right hand page by Bratislav Milencović.

Muscle On

A few big things to blog about this Monday so this is going to be a long post!

First up, our first ever solo show opened at Mart Gallery last week. Huge thanks to Mel for having such an awesome space and hosting us, Sam for lending us your muscles for bump-in, Ly for coming early and helping set up and Ben and Michael for manning the drinks table and to everyone who came and made it such a great night. "Turns of Speech & Figures of Phrase" will be up for the next 2 weeks until the 19th of March. Also Ca and I will be at the gallery this Wednesday (the 9th) from 1:45 - 3:45 if anyone wants to drop by and have a chat. There are a few more pieces still up for grabs, we'll have pictures up soon.

We'd also like to thank these sites who have posted up our work, its awesome to know that our work is liked! Cheers Sick of the Radio, Design Work Life, Graphism, Walk the Sand, Portable.TV, MrXStitch, August Empress, Las Teje y Maneje, Banana Meet Cute, Jessica Swift, Might & Wonder and The Brag for the very kind words.

We mentioned in the last post that we we're madly tag-team sewing the last piece for the show. Well, in between the sewing we also took turns whipping up an illustration for Anorak Magazine's Food Is Fun project. Our paper illustration is now up on the Anorak site, it's bursting with fortune cookies, fruit and vegie kebabs, cursive hummus and more yummy stuff. Here's a process pic of some goo-ey glue paste type...

We're prepping for our trip to London so we're sorting out what we can take with us and what we'll have to leave behind. As we're not going to be able take all our prints with us our Big Cartel store is now on sale! Our risograph prints are all reduced and I've put the sewn piece "Get All Up In My Goat" up on our store too.

We're heading to London at the end of March, please get in touch if you're in that part of the world and could use a couple of nimble fingered illustrators/designers.

Busy Bs

Hello! This week has turned out to be pretty hectic so the usual Monday blog post is terribly late. We've finally finished the pieces for our Mart show and they are at the framers now. We'll be posting up some process work soon.

Also, recently we've had some lovely write-ups about our show. We were pretty stoked to be on Booooooom! and also today the amazing Pip Lincolne of Meet Me at Mikes just posted up about our work too. Yay! We'd also like to give a huge thanks to Yen Magazine, Lifelounge, Frankie, Tough Titties and What Katie Does for writing up about us as well.

Also if you have time, we posted up some new work over at our site. There's a new Epic Battle and also the Sweater Letter co posted a sneak peek of a few weeks back is now finished. Hope you enjoy!

Yen interview

This month's Yen has just come out and has an interview that co and I did with Yen's editor Annie Sebel. We met her at Black Star pastries for some yummy sweets and coffee and had a chat about just winning the British Council's Realise Your Dream Award, how we work together, the occasional screaming matches that come with being sisters and how our high school art teacher introduced us to Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics and led us on our path to becoming designers.

We're still very shy so we had a quick 90s dance off before hand to calm our nerves. But we needn't have worried, Annie was super nice and friendly!

Tough Titties

We met Lou and Alex from Boccalatte at the Realise Your Dream awards night and they told us about their new blog toughtitties.com.au that is a showcase for creative females. I think it's an awesome idea, and hope word spreads. At UTS our course was probably 80% female if not more but once we started working professionally the female presence seemed significantly lower. I've always wondered why. Sorry I ramble.. please do check out their blog and recommend a tough titty!

PS co and I also have an interview up.

'Blerg' IdN magazine 100th issue + Australian Edge interview

The stop motion animation we directed with Michael Blanche is finally finished! We didn't want to jinx it in case it wasn't finished in time for the deadline but now we can say what it's for. We'll post the final animation when the issue comes out.

Also co and I have an interview up at AustralianEdge. Thanks Clayton and Duncan!

Shout Out

We'd just like to say thank you to the wonderful people at Behance, Motionserved, AustralianEdge and Australian Infront for posting our work up and featuring us. It's nice to know people like our stuff!