Final Countdown: Pricing

The final countdown is a series of blog posts written by third year CAA student Penny giving a student’s perspective of the final shows both in Hereford and at New Designers in London. Penny blogs at ratsasbigascats.com.

This week is all about pricing our final collections. Our course has a really strong business element and we have been learning about what goes into pricing contemporary craft for the last few years. This focus on helping prepare students to be designer/makers when they graduate is one of the main reasons I chose to come the Hereford and now we are putting all that training into practice. These were fairly practical sessions where we got to look at a range of work and have a go at pricing it, ending up pricing each others work!

It was a challenge but on the most part we got the prices right. A lot of the tutors on the CAA courses are working as artists which means that they are able to give us genuine advice about how much we could charge for our work. Professional practice as a module can be very dry and difficult at times but having tutors with this kind of real life experiences helps enormously.

Final Countdown: Summer Shows 101

The final countdown is a series of blog posts written by third year CAA student Penny giving a student’s perspective of the final shows both in Hereford and at New Designers in London. Penny blogs at ratsasbigascats.com.

My posts are going to be mainly talking about the preparation for the Summer Show here in Hereford and our stand at New Designers in London. For those of you who have no idea what these shows are I thought I'd give you a little degree show 101.

The Summer Show is what we have been working toward for the last three years, it is our way of showcasing our work to the world. The show is an exhibition which all of the HE courses at Hereford College of Arts take part in. The work we create for the summer show is assessed as the major part of our final module. Students and staff are all involved in getting the show ready which I have been warned will mainly involve gallons of white paint, frayed tempers and stubbed toes but which will result in a cohesive and exciting show. 

This year it takes place at Hereford College of Arts Folly Lane Campus and is open to the public from Saturday 15th June - Wednesday 19th June. To give you an idea of what the exhibitions is like, below is a film showing last year's CAA Summer Show. Head over to HCA's youtube channel to see film's of work from all the HCA courses.

Two days after the show in Hereford closes we pack up the very full van and take the whole Craft's Cluster show down to New Designers. New Designers is an exhibition held in the Business Design Centre in London. It features stands from most of the design courses across the UK. It offers us a great opportunity to show work to a very diverse range of visitors, from gallery owners, to journalists, to buyer, to collectors and to the public. We will be exhibiting in part one which is open to the public from Thursday 27th June to Saturday 29th June.

If you get a chance please come and visit us at one of our shows, we'd love to see you and show you our work!

The Final Countdown

 Final Countdown is a series of blog posts written by third year CAA student Penny giving a student’s perspective of preparing for the  final shows both in Hereford and at New Designers in London. Penny blogs at ratsasbigascats.com.

As the length of time we have left before our final collection has to be submitted has ticked over from being counted in weeks to being counted in days, attention has turned to all of the things that have to be done before the final show. Our year group is one of the biggest Crafts Cluster groups HCA has had, which means the show needs to be very carefully designed to ensure everyone’s work is given the best possible showcase. Last week we had a big whole year group meeting in which everyone’s to-do lists suddenly doubled. There are so many little things that need to be done before we open the doors to our Final Show: artist statements to write; figuring out how on earth to display our work; show passes to order; travel arrangements to sort; graduation ceremonies to book and gowns to hire; postcards to order; a professional photography session to have images to put on the cards; work to be finished in time to be photographed and then put on the postcards….and the list continues! It is taking some very careful time management to make sure it all gets done.

I fear the next few weeks are going to see more than a few tears, frayed tempers and tantrums but the sun is shining and just a little glimmer of excitement is starting to seep into the studio the glimmer that that we did it, we got to our last month at college and it is going to be brilliant.