By Evie Brett The Norman Rea Gallery (based at the University of York) opened its doors for the opening night of the second exhibition of their 2024/25 programme on 27th November. ‘For Your Convenience’, curated by Vice Directors Rowan Hill and Maddie Gilbert, aimed to highlight the impacts of ‘Convenience Culture’ on both our everyday...
Author: shopmorekindness
Hand Block Printing
by Evie Brett This past Sunday, I took a trip to York Art Gallery to see the new exhibition, The Art of Wallpaper: Morris & Co. – something I had been longing to do ever since the show first opened in September. As both a current Art History student and simply a lover of anything...
Paisley – eternity, intuition & psychedelia
By Evie Brett Though the birth of the paisley pattern dates back as far as the first millennium AD, the famous teardrop-shaped design is still very much used and enjoyed today within both clothing and art more generally. Also known as the boteh or buta, the motif was first developed during the Sassanid dynasty, having...
Conscious Apparel & Upcycling
Our clothes at Conscious Apparel are about slow fashion – they are elegant, luxurious and timeless pieces. We are also firmly committed to the practice of upcycling. Up cycling, or ‘creative reuse’, effectively means taking something no longer in use and repurposing it. Through cutting, stitching and refashioning, to upcycle something grants it a second...
Monet comes to York and inspires Conscious Apparel
Over the years, we have built a great team for our photoshoots – working with photographer Deborah Stevenson and artist/jewellery maker Ruth Claydon. We try to make the photoshoots relaxed and fun – as we want the models to feel able to express themselves and really enjoy taking part – believing this will show the...
Timeless clothes at great prices
Ethical fashion means paying skilled workers and artisans properly and it can mean using more expensive fabrics and production processes that are less harmful to the environment. So our clothing is a bit more expensive than the high street. It can be frustrating when we put up a post on social media and the only...
These clothes make me feel confident!
Its lovely when we hear back from customers who love our clothes and even better when they tell us that our clothes have given them more confidence. One customer recently told us of wearing an outfit to a work do – and everyone commenting on how fantastic she looked. She told us that after the...
The Wabi Sabi necklace from Moth & Magpie
Recently, artist and jewellery maker Ruth Claydon made an utterly fabulous necklace for us that included a beautiful Japanese ceramic bead, an ancient Roman bead and a mudlarked clay pipe fragment, worn down by the years – and in searching for the name of the piece we realised that this jewellery was all about the...
Sustainable Fashion & Social Prescribing
Conscious Apparel model Holly Firth-Davies talks about her long time love of beautiful clothes, her ethos of sustainability and tells us about social prescribing – a new way of supporting health and wellbeing. My desire for beautiful clothes started with the patterns and fabrics of my mother’s dresses in the 1950s – leading to a...
Art and jewellery – creating new treasures from old
Each day the Thames is a new archeological site as the layers of silt and mud expose new treasures. Fine art trained Ruth Claydon creates truly beautiful unique pieces from her mudlarking finds, archeological artefacts and vintage jewellery under the name Moth & Magpie. Ruth’s passion is mudlarking and what might look like something rusty,...