Guest Blog Post British textile designer and weaver Anna Champeney tells Selvedge how she designed Soft Urban, her new collection of 100% contemporary woven merino throws inspired by urban landscapes and architecture. As a teenager growing up in Norwich in the 1980s Anna Champeney liked nothing better than staging fashion shoots with friends in the brutalist university campus of UEA, designed by Denys Lasdun. Its raised concrete walkways, steps and geometric buildings made a great and dramatic backdrop. Fast forward some thirty years; Anna is running her textile design and weave studio from the North Spanish mountain village where she and her Spanish partner settled in 2000. Somehow this formative experience feeds through into the design process for a new collection of contemporary throws and cushions and Soft Urban is born. “The strong and sometimes severe appearance of brutalist architecture always invites comment and I wanted to create a collection that would make a dramatic impact in interiors” commented Anna. “Most woven designs woven on dobby looms are small-scale repeating patterns and I wanted to break free of this limitation and use the rectangular form of the throw as a larger kind of textile canvas”. The resultant blok design is asymmetrical, large-scale design is contemporary and bold. You can view it as an abstract geometic pattern or as urban landscape. It complements a second design, Optic Stripe. Stripes embedded in the weave play visual games with the viewer and captures the sense of movement of interweaving rush-hour traffic or pedestrians on crowded pavements. The third and last design in the collection, Bump, converts motifs of city life such as zebra crossings and queues of cars into a simple and playful pattern. Anna samples designs for her throws on one of the studio´s handlooms in order to test colourways and perfect the designs but they are woven at one of Spain´s top, family-run mills which also weaves fabrics for top luxury brands. “I love going to supervise production at the mill” comments Anna “it´s a chance to work alongside an expert team with the same passion for woven textiles and commitment to quality and it´s also very exciting to see the designs being produced full-size”. Anna has designed seven powerful and distinct colourways for the Soft Urban collection, ranging from a fresh zingy Mulberry Spice colourway to the more muted and natural tones of Ebon and Forest. “I love working with colour” adds Anna “Over 15 years of extracting natural dyes at the studio for our handwoven scarf collections means you develop a sensitivity for colour; grey is never just grey, it can be pink or yellow or mauve. Combining different colours in a woven textile is like throwing a party with lots of different people in the same room – you can really see the chemistry of different colours meeting each other”. Soft Urban launches internationally at Top Drawer at London Olympia between the 15-17 January. Throws and matching cushions can also be purchased online at annachampeney.com. www.topdrawer.co.uk www.annachampeney.com