The festival kicks off with work from both International and Serbian designers taking over the Sava quarter of the city with Psalt Design taking part in the Ghost Project with other international designers.

You can check out more information on the Tension Bench here!

A little while ago we set up our blog apinchofpsalt as a starting point for our business. We had some not so good days averaging a total of 4 visitors per day until something great happened. We got featured on The Fancy things really took off. The picture of our Bubble Tank went around the globe and since then we’ve amassed a grand total of 24, 046 views and had countless inquires from as far away as Brazil, Hong-Kong and plenty from the USA regarding how people can purchase the Bubble Tank. We’ve exhibited the Design Event MART in Newcastle and we were featured in The Sunday Times. Finally…the wait is over!

Today we are happy to announce that the Bubble Tank will go into production in small batches early November and as of today it is available to pre-order. Just register your interest at orders@psaltdesign.co.uk to reserve one from the first batch to be made. The first batch will be 25 units and from there we aim to keep producing once or twice a month to meet the demand. We hope that you appreciate due to the bespoke nature of the design and its unique form it is not something we aim to mass produce. Each one is hand made by our Master Glassblower, a celebration of skill and craft in a truly beautiful product. We can’t wait to start shipping them out and have really taken a lot of motivation from the feedback we have had so far.

You may have noticed that we have worked hard to make some changes. The new version has a larger opening at the neck to allow for easier access with a small net or to house a small filter. Each one comes carefully packed in a custom made screen-printed box to make sure it arrives at your door perfectly. As it should be.

Once again we can’t tell you how excited we are to be finally making these available…it’s probably taken a little longer than we expected but we wanted the website and new product to all come together at the right time.

We hope you like it!

We had a great time at Design Event MART this year and made a lot of cool people with a diverse range of work on display. Some of our favourites were as follows.

We really liked the ‘Y I’ series by Westergaard Designs because of their playful references to the city of Newcastle. We thought these were a novel gift and have put the whole collection on our christmas list.

Another highlight was Hannah Wales designs in particular ‘SILI mug sleeves’.  Made from silicone and available in a range of colours. The sleeves are cast in moulds to give the look and feel of a knitted woolen cardigan and we thought this type of texture worked well in creating a striking product. These products were awarded first prize in the ‘Most Innovative Use Of Material’ category at the event and are available to buy here. Also worth checking out is Hannah’s ‘SILI stool’ series. We thought they were particularly lovely and could see them in a host of different environments.

Images © Westergaard Design & Hannah Wales

The new website will bring together our collection of work as we grow as a business and develop. In the coming weeks and months we will be implementing all sorts of exciting changes. An online store so that when we have stock of items like the Bubble Tank the whole process of ordering and getting one shipped out will be a piece of cake, pictures of our new products and lots more.

The blog area will be filled with interesting little stories and articles about what we have seen and what we like in design, life and art so we hope you get involved, share and help create a great little community.

We hope you enjoy it.

This year, we preferred ‘TENT’, ‘Designers Block’ and ‘Tramshed’. All mentioned seem to put the emphasis on good design rather than commercial viability and it was refreshing to see some exciting conceptual pieces from lesser known designers. Below is several of our ‘best bits’ from our favourite show of the year, ‘Designers Block’.

‘Tripod’ by Lukas Dahlen at ‘Designers Block’ was one thing we loved for obvious reasons. We felt it worked really well as a light and loved the relationship between the glass and timber.

Image taken from http://lukasdahlen.se/

Support your local artists and that… Dan Schofield is a graduate from Sheffield Hallam who was also showing his work at ‘Designers Block’. We love his style of work and think his ‘Shifty’ desk was (Cue stereotypical Sheffield accent) ‘Reight good’.

Image taken from http://www.danielschofieldesign.com/

We also liked ‘JAILmake’ and their ‘Plantable’ table. We especially liked the fact that it was sourced, designed and made in Britain as well as being custom made to order.

Image taken from http://jail-make.co.uk/

We had a great time this year at LDF and saw some really interesting things. We really enjoyed the exhibitions mentioned above and feel that the best way to experience the festival is to go off the beaten track and it won’t be long until you stumble upon some amazing pop-up stalls and exhibitions. Hopefully next year people we will be exhibiting as well as visiting.

Photo taken from Haggler Corner.

The event was a great success and the live music, food and drinks went down really well. We also got to speak to some cool people including Will Ferraby, a bespoke knife maker from Sheffield. He also had a stand and was showing some of his work. We thought these were amazingly crafted and would love to collaborate with him in the near future 

Photo taken from www.ferrabyknives.co.uk 

Daniel + Emma are a design studio from Adelaide, Australia and their stand at 100% was very inviting, I was drawn in by their paper weight objects made from highly polished brass giving a gold finish, they appealed to our magpie nature for all things gold and shiny. Their whole stand was very well presented letting the objects speak for themselves. below is a quote from there small booklet (also very well presented) which sums up Daniel+Emma studio nicely.

“we take pleasure in ordinary everyday things and like the idea of viewing daily life as something special. we try to reflect this sentiment with each piece we make. our design aim to be ‘just nice’ “