It is a love letter to the wonders of needlework, a multi-storey mill for the 21st century. Our writer enters an orange peel lobby and ascends some Harry Potter stairs at the new London College of Fashion It must be the ironing board with the best view in the capital. On the top floor of the new London College of Fashion, in a prime corner of the kind usually reserved for a boardroom, a student is busy pressing their garments in front of a rolling panorama of the Olympic Park and the towers of the City beyond. Behind the vertiginous ironing station, past serried ranks of sewing machines, a gre ..read more

The study of - and training in - the design and use of textiles and other materials to create clothing ..read more

The study of - and training in - the design and use of textiles and other materials to create clothing ..read more

My colleague Judith Found, who has died aged 77, was a printed textiles designer who taught fashion print for 55 years at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Born in Horsforth, a town within the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, Judith was the daughter of Edna (nee Tidswell) and Albert Found, a chief draughtsman for a firm of engineers in Bradford. She was brought up in Pudsey with two brothers, Michael and Paul, attending Primrose Hill secondary modern school ..read more

Fashion buyer and recruitment consultant with a quick wit, forthright opinions and an understanding of the creative soul Long before the arrival of LinkedIn, when recruitment via virtual means became a reality, Vanessa Denza, who has died aged 84, was synonymous with placing UK fashion talent into prime positions in the global fashion industry. Operating from an office in central London, with 30 filing cabinets and a word-of-mouth policy, Denza choreographed the careers of countless graduates, securing jobs from designers to buyers, merchandisers to creative directors. She founded her company ..read more

In lockdown, thousands of people began making their own clothes for the first time – a movement born of creativity and conscious consumption My foot hovers nervously over the sewing machine pedal. I am cautiously working my way through a sew-it-yourself kit produced by Pattern Project, a “microfactory” startup in south London. It has pioneered a laser-cutting machine that can cut patterns on demand, with minimal waste. The pieces for the dropped-sleeve dress that I am sewing have been snipped to my precise measurements by a zippy little laser, which whizzes over the crisp Irish linen, scorchin ..read more

The illustrator’s vivid depictions of her annual visits to Mexico reveal why she was the author’s kindred spirit I have been relishing an illustrated book by Corinna Sargood. I love this artist’s paintings of Mexican life: bright scenes on wood, some in tin frames, crammed with tiny figures: a harpist, a bullfighter, a psychiatrist appealing for patients through a loudspeaker. They often have moving parts and secret windows; in one, miniature doors swing open to show the painter and her carpenter husband reading in bed. The Village in the Valley, published this month by Prospect Books, is Sarg ..read more

My old school friend Sue Foulston, who has died aged 68 of cancer, was a fashion designer and a teacher of fashion at Central Saint Martins college of art. Sue was always thrilled at the prospect of refining raw talent, and was one of the instigators, in 1999, of CSM’s highly regarded annual White Show – in which first-year fashion students present looks made entirely from a piece of white fabric. Sue relished the excitement of teaching; she lived life to the full, and from the day I met her Sue led me and all her friends in her wake, as she surged ahead ..read more

Subtle and sometimes unsettling textile artist who oversaw a globally respected degree course at Goldsmiths The textile artist Audrey Walker, who has died aged 92, was renowned for embroideries built up from pointillist layers of thread – machine and hand-stitched. Her finest works, seen at a retrospective exhibition in 2000 at Ruthin Craft Centre in north Wales, were created after her retirement from teaching in the late 1980s. Psychologically unsettling figurative wall pieces, monumental in mood, they were inspired by historical textiles, by archaic Greek sculpture, and by the art of the ear ..read more

My partner, Nicholas Bullen, who has died aged 74, was a costume designer and fashion and textiles teacher. Nick joined BBC Television as a costume designer in 1967, working on drama and entertainment programmes, most notably two Doctor Who stories with Patrick Troughton: The War Games and The Space Pirates, both part of the sixth season and broadcast in 1969 ..read more