Colin Herd


sweater design

split up into six portions, so as to
avoid being too much like a flag:
the top cell’s gray and fluffy, with a
luxury sort of a yarn and metallic
detailing- simple strands. with what they
call a boat neckline, low and curved. i say gray
but it’s a pinkish gray, like a can of tuna.

the next part’s smooth and yellow-green
with ovoid, slightly hairy buds in the
middle portion. botanical- in my mind it’s
goat willow- it’s just got to contrast utterly
with the one above.

then it’s a simple custard knit, accented
generously but sporadically with cranky
red buttons, of varying shapes and sizes.
maybe some of those funny little horns
that duffle coats have.

it’s not colour blocking, because there’s
way too much going on in each section,
but you probably see that we’ve gone from
gray to green to custard yellow, so the next
step is to make a surprise move away from
yellow altogether but to something
complementary- like a pinot noir. except, we’re
going lurex, like prada did. svelte and sour.

after that, you want a check, with deep
reds and winey purples, arranged in little
pixels. the idea’s to be more subtle down
the bottom, to draw the eye up to the face,
but there still has to be something- so i’ve
settled on some of the metallic detailing from
the first section, just spun through the yarn. it’s
got to be chunky and i don’t care how.

the final section starts in wholemeal, with a
thin strip of cream, followed by a variable pinkish
red, another strip of cream and back to wholemeal.
it’s to look like a raspberry and cream cheese
sandwich so the wholemeal bit can be fairly
precise but the cream and pink need to bleed into
each other, as they would.



shoe design

there’s a bit in jim jarmusch’s
Limits of Control where Isaach
de Bankolé is sitting at a cafe
ordering two espressos in
separate cups. so i think, why
not, that can be the base, but
upside down so that the flat of
the shoe is the two connected
saucers. and then for a heel,
we’ll use the burgundy folded-
up canopy behind him, which
fastigiates to a silvery point,
because in a shoe like this you
have to have a point. better yet,
we could use the sapling encased
in a sort of mesh. that gives it more
edge, and the tentative branches
could creep up the ankle. he has
a bit of a hassle ordering them,
because it comes like a double
espresso but eventually he gets
what he wants.



rug design

it’s going to be
elliptical, the
background in
porcelain white.
around the edges
there’ll be grey
patches and
splodges like
residual debris.
the odd faintly
outlined schools
or families of
bubbles in a
lighter grey a
little further in,
some hugging
each other, conjoined
together, others
fending for themselves,
out on their own.
about 35cms from
the right hand
point and 20
in from the edge,
there’ll be a silvery
rectangle with
one of its edges folded
in on itself. the folded
edge will be red.
within the silver bit,
there are hints
of apricot, just
traces. then, about
a further 20 cm over,
there will be three
largish irregular
clouds of the same
apricot, maybe a little
less pastel, a little
more sherbert. the
shape doesn’t
matter too much
as long as they are
irregular, maybe
base one on a wall-
mounted vincent
fecteau sculpture,
another on one of
those foam pointing
hands you get at
sports grounds and
the final one should
be like a flat pool,
shoe insole-shape.
that’s about it. the
concept of the design
is based on my sink-
soap dish, which
spoke to me this
morning while i
was brushing my
teeth.



Colin Herd was born in Stirling, Scotland in 1985. His first full-length collection too ok came out in 2011 from BlazeVOX and a chapbook, like, came out in 2010 from The Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. Poems are forthcoming in the anthology Dear World and Everyone in It (Bloodaxe, 2012)
 
 
previous page     contents     next page