"The aim of this prize is to promote the use of hand embroidered surface embellishment within fashion, costume and soft furnishing. All in the hope that contemporary design and other fresh approaches will be inspired to embrace hand embroidery, to acknowledge and value its quality and expertise."
This prompted a discussion on one of the points of the brief:
"Ensure that the finished product is both practical and commercially viable"
Many of the designs (the winning one included) used mainly forms of bead embellishment, the quickest and easiest way to cover a piece of fabric. So my question is, in the age of machine embroidery and cheap labour from the east, can hand embroidery (and not bead embellishment) truly be practical and commercially viable?
This is a great challenge indeed, and maybe the only way to find out is to enter the competition. I was interested to see that many of the entrants, from my point of view I hasten to add, seemed to have missed this point completely. Although only 5 marks were given for commercial viability, the whole project was based around this idea. Many of the entries were very beautifully embroidered, but were not commercially viable and I think it was that reason only that they didn't win.
Hand embroidery by definition is never going to be as quick as machine embroidery. So it boils down to, how do you get someone to appreciate the skill and quality of something made by hand? I guess if we knew the answer to that, all embroiderers would be millionaires!The theme for the 2010 competition is Militaria and you can choose from different briefs. If anyone is interested in answering my question, you can follow the link below:
http://www.handembroidery.com/prize-conference/prize-2010/brief/
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