Vote for Knitthink for Peru!

Hello everyone! This is a project that I worked on at my school here in Milan and I was hoping you guys could take a moment of your time to vote for my group. I dont know if you remember from my post a couple of weeks ago but I worked on this project during a week long workshop with the students at the Politecnico di Milano.  During this week we worked with a company based in peru that creates work opportunities for women there. The company has posted all of the projects to their website and will produce and sell the garments for the group with the most "likes" on facebook.
"The City of Women" is my group (group number 9).  

http://www.knithink.it/?page_id=326

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Knithink-for-Per%C3%B9/482597941784464?sk=app_208195102528120

I'm sorry it's in italian but you only have to like the knitthink page first and then you will have the option to vote by clicking 'like' next to the groups.

Unfortunately you will not be able to vote if you do not have facebook.  

Grazie mille and Buon Natale!

Christmas time in Milano

This weekend was the Festa di St. Ambrogio.  St. Ambrogio is the patron saint of Milan and every year on December 7th they celebrate with wonderful holiday markets and fairs. To make things even more magical on friday it snowed for the first time this year!  The whole city had a wonderful christmas feel:)  Here are some photos from the weekend...

The beginning of the snow:)

Wonderful Sicilian sweets at the Christmas market!

Snow in Parco Sempione

Christmas horses in the park

More sweets! The cannolis were to die for.

The beautiful canal is FINALLY full again!

My apartment building in the snow.

After going to all of the markets in the city center we took a trip out to L'ARTIGIANO IN FIER . It is an incredible fair with foods and crafts from all over the world.  It takes place in a massive expo center.  We spent hours eating and sampling the best foods from all around the world.  This bread is from the region Puglia in the south of Italy.

Now that's a big piece of bread!

WorkShop with the Politecnico

This past week all of the FIT 4th year students participated in a workshop with the Politecnico students.  Each semester the Politecnico students work on a week long project for various companies all over the world.  I choose to participate in a workshop for the project Knithink for Peru with the company AspemItalia.  I was in a group with 3 Italian students and one Russian student.  We had to create a knit garment inspired by Peru.  We had five days to create a concept, mood, design, technical information, and knit swatch.  Here is what my group came up with...

This is our mood board.  We were inspired by the poverty in a small town in Peru.

We took our design concept from the amazing women in Peru.  We focused on re-designing the basic Aztec tunic while focusing on the graphic boarder at the bottom of their dresses. 

This is one of the swatches that I made on the 5 gauge coppo machine.  I used a miss stitch to create a graphic effect that mimics the houses in our mood board.

This swatch is another solution to create the pattern that we wanted.  Instead of using a miss stitch I designed a Jacquard that I used to create this on the 5 gauge brother machine. 

This is our design.  Simple yet beautiful.

This is our color card, it mimics the bright colors of South America.

This is the technical page with all of the information about the knit stitches.

This is another technical page with information about the specifics of our garment.

It was a great project.  I had a wonderful time working with both the italians and the company!