When someone says to me "London Fashion Week" three things go through my head. The first is the visceral thought of the pain of over a hundred show requests. The second is the dread of how sparse my wardrobe is and how the h-e-double-hockey-sticks am I going to create five different outfits without looking like an absolute plebe. The third thing is something I can't describe, but it makes me feel fairly giddy and nauseous at the same time. Go figure. Fashion week is a figurative pain in my rear end. Early mornings, late nights, inflated egos, seeing that person you can't tolerate, having serious outfit envy - it all adds up to me saying "I hate fashion week" over and over until my assistant has decided she's sick of me. And yet (and mayb..

Fred Butler (courtesy of Maia Adams, Adorn Blog) So, it's heading our way really quickly. London Fashion Week. The very best Fashion Week of them all in my humble opinion. Alive, buzzing, risk-taking, reverberating, fresh and all with an audacious wink of its eye. Fred Butler (courtesy of Maia Adams, Adorn Blog)Yet for all of the excitement it is accompanied by a shameful wrenching of the very guts of me...What to wear. Nay, how to walk into a forum full of exceedingly young, terribly beautiful girls, all dressed to kill, all dazzling. When I feel I am just an older, curvier, mostly invisible woman. Yet, when I am there, after all of the agonising, I walk into the courtyard at Somerset House and my anguish is gone in a microsecon..

Occasionally we happen upon a young designer who has taken the less conventional path to finding her art. Someone who's chosen to turn her ordered world upside down in pursuit of a creative dream, a life more fulfilled. Meet the lovely Louise Dungate. Louise had a glittering career as an up and coming creative in the advertising business. The job was high pressure  and high stress and to help herself (along with her colleagues) to relax Louise joined an after hours Knit Club. Knitting was something that Louise had always been enthralled by, from the early days of her childhood, from time spent with her Gran and Aunty (both avid knitters) and from her own early interaction with the big pointy needles. Louise soon found herself enj..