An award winning and highly creative design professional Kayleigh creates printed, embroidered and embellished textile designs for the fashion, interiors and product markets. She is highly skilled in her ability to design and produce commercially viable designs from artwork utilising extensive hand, machine and digital skills.

Kayleigh completed her MA in Textile Design Innovation at Nottingham Trent University where she received a Distinction for her work. During this time she explored how traditional textile techniques can be used with modern technology to create innovative designs. As a part of this she investigated how smart textile applications, e-textiles and 3D printing can be used alongside a range of embellishment and print techniques. From this she has developed a wider skill set for creating her embroidery designs including tambour beading, goldwork and using Wilcom for digital embroidery. She was also able to further develop her screen printing and digital printing knowledge.

For designing Kayleigh has equipped herself with several specialist machines and software to assist in the production of her designs giving her the ability to produce a wide variety of work covering more specialist techniques. Embroidery equipment includes an Irish embroidery machine, Embellisher and a range of attachments for manipulating fabric for her sewing machine. For Digital work she uses Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator as well as working in Affinity Photo and Design. Kayleigh is also experienced in Wilcom Embroidery Studio E4 and so is capable of producing digital embroidery designs ready for production.

Kayleigh's current printed textile designs can be purchased through her Patternbank page.

Awards

Kayleigh was awarded 1st prize in the Hand & Lock Prize for Embroidery 2017 in the Wilcom Fashion Category. She was also nominated for inclusion in Texprint 2017 whilst studying for her MA.

Winning Hand & Lock Entry

Photography: Hand & Lock/Jutta Klee