We have been busy bee's here in the TechStyleLAB this spring. We had a moment to play and design our take on an easter egg fabric!

This week is spring break at Kent State and we are using this time to play catch up as well as do some summer planning. Last year we had a booth at Kent, Ohio's Masterpieces on Main. We are planning on doing it again this year. The image above is of one of the dresses we created for the show. This dress combined the two images on the right side. These images are of a postacard from the 1930's. We scanned the images in at 1200 dpi and were able to blow it up large scale to fit the form of the dress.

Over the past two days the Fashion School at Kent State has conducted the senior fashion reviews. I took the opportunity to photograph some of the students work that was created with our help in the TechStyleLAB.

Today Kevin and I sat in on Professor Kim Hahn's class on advanced pattern making, a junior level pattern class at the Fashion School. They took on an enginerred print project where they digitized their pattern pieces, then placed print images into the patterns pieces via Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

Monday night, February 4th, we held our first design your own pillow workshop! In this workshop we worked with students from the Fashion Student Organization as well as Modista. It was taught by one of our own professors in The Fashion School, William Perrin. Thanks so much to all those who participated!

The goal of the TechStyleLAB is to encourage academic or commercial investigations with textiles. We house both a Mimaki digital fabric printer and a large, flatbed laser cutter. We do not currently offer our laser cutting services through the website but if you are interested in creating a laser cut fabric please email or call us! Here we have Maria Margala, one of our senior fashion design students working on some laser cut pieces for her senior collection.

One of our instructors, Archana Mehta, at the Fashion School is sewing a quilt for the Husdon Montessori School in Hudson, Ohio. This quilt will include over 50 original drawings created by their 4th grade class. The images above are some of the examples of the 50 drawings used. These images were printed onto cotton sateen fabric and she will cut them apart to sew into the quilt.

This past fall we held our very first holiday scarf workshop! This event was open to the public and lead by one of our own students at the Fashion School, Prerna Suri, who also designed all of the original artwork used for the event. In this workshop we worked on helping the participants with designing their very own infinity style, silk scarf which could be used as a holiday gift for a loved one.

This summer we worked with the Porthouse Theater to create some fun, summery scarves! The designs above showcase the array of designs we came up with for the project. These scarves were printed on a nice, lightweight silk crepe georgette. These scarves were printed in a limited edition and sold at the Porthouse Theater during their 2012 summer season.

This is an example of a portion of the design process. For this design it is exploring the use of both geometric (the background) imagery along with photographic imagery (the bee). Printing rich photographic imagery onto beautiful natural fibers is something we specialize in at the TechStyleLAB!