Paper and fabric snow for Regent street Winter Retreat 2018

Regent street Winter Retreat

With Heaps +Stacks & Regent street W1

The build up to Christmas this year was one of the busiest yet, but mainly because I couldn’t say no to so many exciting new projects! None more so than this one. Heaps + Stacks got in touch and asked whether I’d like to work with them to create a window display for a Winter Retreat for shoppers on Regent street, somewhere you could escape from the Christmas chaos and unwind, get your presents wrapped, have a massage as well as take part in workshops. Of course I said yes!

The brief was to create paper and fabric snowfall in all four windows of the stunning new Quadrant arcade on Regent street, it really is a beautiful shopping arcade. I popped down to see the place and measure up…. the windows are huge! I am going to need a lot of fabric, paper and wool….as well as help! So I got right to it with the help of some lovely people, (Lilly, Zoe, Liz, Adam, Nichole and Leah, thank you!)

The team shredded and cut metres and metres of fabric and paper, varying thicknesses, finishes and sparkle to give a lovely varied feel, much like real snowfall in winter. The fabric had to be slightly transparent like snow too, this picture above demonstrates how effectively it worked. As does this one to the right…

In around two weeks the team managed to hand sew over 2km of wool through thousands of shreds of paper and fabric. The biggest challenge was not getting them all tangled up! With only a few lengths getting tangled and taking forever to un-tangle!! We got all the lengths to the arcade ready for the install.

The install took us three days, we had to hang a series of white wooden dowels on the ceiling, curving around with the windows yet zig-zagging to allow some depth when we hung the lengths of snow. All four windows are around 3m high and 6m wide….so pretty big!

Once all the dowels were up we went about hanging the lengths, this was relatively easy but we got into a few tangles….not fun to rectify!

An electrician worked closely with us to have lengths of fairy lights running through the snow and I think you can agree, the end result is quite beautiful….

It was strange because during the entire install there was hoarding up in front of the arcade which meant we could never see it in full from the street… not until we came back in the week after install.

First time we saw the entire front of the arcade with the hoarding down.

This was such a fab project, the sort of thing I’d love to work on more in the future. Thank you so much to Heaps + Stacks as well as Regent street W1 for entrusting me with the designs, the whole concept was great and what you created over all was truly beautiful.