i can't edit

An email arrives. One I was hoping not to get but searching for every day. From BBH: Zag. I don't want this job do I? It'll be scary and real and in a big glass building with loads of people who know what they're doing in there...Damn, I got the work placement. Wow, I beat the other interviewees! But what if I do something stupid when I'm there? Think of the good experience you can write on your CV...Rest assured I didn't have this conversation with myself out loud because in a place like High Wycombe you're likely to get lynched there and then in the high street. I've worn a stripey jumper in that town before and had strangers shout 'Dennis The Menace!' at me. If I had pointed out the Burberry caps and tracksuit trousers they wore I don't think I'd have made myself any more popular there.
I had a choice to make. There was never any question that I'd accept the work placement. After all, I'd just look like a right idiot if I said 'Well...I went to the interview...You looked at my work...I made the effort for you to like me...That was all for a bit of fun really because I'm not bothering to come back.'
It was just a work placement after all, not a contract to sign my soul away...or was it? Were they going to make me do work branding all the things I find wrong with the world? Was I going to design the next Conservative logo? Trick people into thinking that they are hideous and encourage them to buy the latest poly-filler face cream to make them feel better? There was only one way I could find out...
But I still had a choice to make. When they emailed they asked whether I would like to go into the office and do a two-week placement with them once I had finished my course or work freelance and do a project right now. Freelance appealed to me immediately because I could work from home, watch Neighbours as I did it and look up anything I didn't know how to do on the internet to help me along if they asked me to do something I was unsure of. Yay! But I had to start right away...when my final project at uni was taking up 25 hours a day every day. Rubbishness. I had to bite the bullet and do the thing I feared the most. Go in to the agency and hope that I didn't look too stupid whilst I was there. I wouldn't even have Ernest to keep me company...

The evil world of advertising and branding could be shoved to the back to my mind for a while. I spent my time in the garden making my bedsheets extremely dirty by trying out different ways of making them into a tent. Having looked at different tents available to buy I knew I wouldn't have the easy option of buying one ready-made and printing on it. Because of the amazing SOS banner it would have to lie flat (and preferably be rectangular) to work properly. And the material used would have to be screenprintable. And a lesser, more designery point is that it'd have to be a good colour and material too. I would have to find some perfect.
'Luckily' I found a really good unbranded survival blanket that already existed; a flat rectangle, silver on one side and waterproof on the other. They even came in different colours. I could have one shelter for drought and another for wet and cold weather! Yay!.....My tutor hated it. He wanted it to be more 'hi-tech material' and sent me off into London to search. Always ignore a tutor if you're 100% positive they are wrong. Design is often subjective so sometimes doing what you like is best (remember who is marking your work though!) But I knew, annoyingly, that he was right. I'd have to get this thing made.

And so, because it's not very interesting and also I can't be bothered to relive every detail of the nightmare that had just begun here are some of the many things I had to do. I suspect the list won't look very long but timewise it was a lot! To-ing and fro-ing from High Wycombe to London inbetween lectures, crits and tutor feedback is no fun.
First of all, I knew I was completely incapable of sewing in a straight line, let alone make a tent. The people on the textile courses would be busy with their own final projects and, besides, I didn't know any of them. However, I do have one single friend (at least) Hello Cassie. Being very lovely and useful (and an ex-fashion designer) she took me to meet a very lovely and useful (and fairly scary) man called Aziz in Bethnal Green. When she told me we were going to a factory to meet the owner I was slightly worried that I'd be asked loads of technical questions about this tent when I only had a vague idea of what it'd look like, let alone how it would work. I had visions of massive machines churning out clothes and bags and having to go upstairs from the factory floor to speak to the owner in a decidedly 70s looking office. It turned out to be a large room in Bethnal Green full of sewing machines and men with very long beards. Aziz is a man who will sew you anything so long as you give him a pattern and give him money for it. He normally makes clothes for fashion designers who do small runs of items and bits and bobs for fashion students. After a short lecture on how Allah has already decided when the world is going to end and there's nothing we can do about it, I persuaded him we may as well be waterproof whilst it happens and he agreed to make my tent. All I had to do was find the material and make a pattern rather than show him a scrappy little sketch.
The rest is going to be a list now, I promise. To give you an idea of timing, this was about a month and a half before the deadline. Sounds a lot. But when some of these things took a week it was a pretty close thing in the end! I...

...made a paper pattern of the shelter.
...took it to Aziz so he could make a full-size practice version on scrap material.
...ran around London looking at fabrics. Persuaded the shops to give me fabric samples by pretending to come from Cassie's fashion company.
...discussed the fabrics with my tutors.
...ran around looking for and buying the extras needed for the tent (edging stuff, eyelets, velcro etc)
...discussed the fabrics with Aziz.
...started to design the actual designs...seeing as my degree was in Graphic Design it was about time that I started doing this. I was pretty much having a heart attack about this by now.
...went and picked up the practice version from Aziz in London.
...bought a £7.99 tent from Argos so I could steal the bendy poles from them.
...tested the tent in the garden.
...frantically did more design.
...found a screenprinter willing to print onto fabric very very quickly.
...visited the printer...where they took one look at my fabric samples and shook their heads. Apparently they wouldn't do it on that type of fabric.
...went outside and sat on a bench wondering what on Earth to do seeing as I had to get it printed very quickly before giving the pieces of fabric back to Aziz so he could actually make the thing (or should I say thingS because there were two of them...one for hot weather, one for cold/wet weather) I was in the middle of London with nowhere to go and no printer to get my work done and very little time! My world was pretty much ending at that point so I called the only person I knew in London who could help. Good ol' Cassie told me to get myself to her house (with the help of my A-Z) so I walked the very long walk to Hackney. She got on the phone to a screenprinting studio down the road from her and persuaded an illustrator to do some printing for me.
...ran to Nick, the screenprinter, at East London Printmakers before it closed to explain to him exactly what I need on what fabric in which colours. He did some tests and agreed to do it. Yay! My life was saved!
...stayed over at Cassie's that night so I could get straight back to it first thing in the morning.
...went to the West End of buy all the fabric.
...dragged it (almost literally, it was so heavy! Neoprene is the stuff that wetsuits are made of and weighs a ton when you're carrying two tents worth of it!) to Aziz's in the East End.
...waited while Aziz measured and cut all the pieces.
...went all the way back to the West End (dragged the cut fabric) to get my designs printed onto massive bits of paper that Nick needed.
...got lost.
...wandered for at least half an hour going round and round a roundabout and trying every single turning in sight for this stupid printer. I knew exactly which street it was on but it didn't seem to exist!
...eventually found it. Gave them the files and was told to come back in half an hour when they should've printed them.
...went back and they hadn't done it...told to come back in another hour.
...AH! Time in the day was running out now and I still had to take all the prints and fabric to Nick in his studio before he left for the evening.
...sat around on a bench by a church for about a year before going back to the printer. It was done, finally!
...went all the way back to the East End with everything and dropped it off to Nick.
...luckily Nick agreed that once he had printed the fabric he'd get it couriered to Aziz so that saved a trip and yet another train ticket!
...finally got back to Wycombe.
...started to design the packaging for my extra eco products that I'd somehow told myself I was going to do.

That was all I could do for my work at the moment but we also had to actually construct the exhibition space where we'd put up all our work so we had to clear all the studios of chairs, tables, sofas and chests of drawers. The rest of it involved a lot of measuring, hauling massive wooden boards around the place, cutting, screwing, painting, cleaning. I am totally useless at this kind of thing so I mainly pretended to be consulting the diagrams of the rooms and got in the way. It took about a week to get it done. It was compulsory we were all in every day so the actual work was on hold for a while! I did manage to get away one afternoon and work over the weekends to...

...go to London to visit Nick to give him his cheque for the printing (eek! expensive!)
...go and visit Aziz to pick up the final two tents and give him his cheque (eek! my bank account was pretty much empty now)
...nearly break my back taking it back to Wycombe on my own.
...put the tents up in the garden to test them out.
...ran out into the rain with it to take it to the fields one afternoon to take some 'flood' photos of it.
...ran out into the sun early one morning to take 'heat wave' photos of it.
...go and buy lots of random things to repackage including things like a red hand fan (had to be red to match the tent obviously) water wings (sprayed blue to match the cold/wet tent, and suntan lotion...and a blue mop.
...make a hasty stand for the tent. Tent poles don't go into wooden floors without difficulty, you see. I had to make a thing that the poles could slot into so I could actually put the tent up in the exhibition.
...design some business cards for visitors to take away from the exhibition.
...get the photos and designs of the tent printed out to put in my portfolio.

SO once all my work was done all I do to do was take it in and put it up...Which was a nice plan...Until I realised the silly thing wasn't even going to fit into my designated space in the studio...Hmm. So another few stressful conversations and heartattacks later I got myself moved from the smaller studio to the larger one. Which then meant I had to do more painting to get the place ready and build a little table for my portfolio. When all that rubbish was done I could finally take the tent in and put it up. The other one was hung on the wall.

And then it was over and I collapsed in my room and didn't move for a few days while the tutors were marking it. All I had to worry was about the tent falling down while I was gone!

Flipping 'eck! Writing it out in bullet points wasn't very helpful was it?! That must've been the most boring blog entry in history. Never mind! It's out of my system now. I'm only 6 months behind in my entries now...oh joy.

PS. I haven't seen the Coca Cola Christmas ad with the trucks yet. Christmas doesn't begin until you see it...I'm worried!

Type in 'AliceInPepperland' into Flickr to see some photos of the final shelter. I haven't put any images of the actual graphics yet because they're all the way over there in my external harddrive somewhere. Tis my next mission!