Ink & Spindle Internship: week 1

I started a internship with company Ink & Spindle recently. They are a boutique textile print company based in the leafy inner Melbourne suburb of Kensington. The studio is based in a beautiful old warehouse not far from the train station and has a great view over the city. As you walk into the studios there are racks of screens with many different designs printed, a large cabinet of mixed and pre-mixed ink colours, a huge garment yardage table taking up the centre of the room and over the other side is a little corner with a vintage couch for tea, lunches and meetings. The office in the next room where alot of administrative work is done is also shared with a few other creative professionals.

Ink & Spindle try to keep things as ethical as possible, using sustainable practice where they can and sourcing fabrics and inks with this in mind. They do customer orders and also have a small showroom set up near the entrance for random drop in customers.

 

 Here is a little collage featuring a few of the new colours that I printed swatches for, including
- Cockatoo &
- Bluestone
They have a new range of colours out including Riversalt, Audrey and others I was to make swatch samples on the 4 different fabrics they use for customer requests so this was a day 1 job for me to get my head around.
Also in the photo is:
-The view out of the window towards the city, lovely atmosphere for a workplace.
-A view across the main studio area towards the corner where all the reams of printed fabrics are kept for customer sales.
-A look at the ink wall and the size of the screens that the meters are printed off (and)
-The corner of the room houses a textiles and printing library with loads of little resource books.

This is a photo of the used backing sheet on the print table, a delightful motif though entirely accidental and reused over and over to protect the sticky table from ink stains. It is a art piece in its own right I think!

A cheeky shot of me standing n front of the yardage table where all the printing is done, the fabric above is drying and in the background is the screen washout area.

Fabric rolls in the print room.

Here are the pretty flowers someone delivered - housed in the reading corner. In the background are some more
swatch colours that I hand screen printed last week.