The third stage on the (smow) design marathon 2010 was the Grassimesse at the Grassi Museum here in Leipzig.
First hosted in 1920 the Grassimesse has established itself as one of Europe's most important sales fairs for contemporary arts and crafts.
And felt.
It also spawned Designers' Open and always invites a wide range of art and design schools to present a selection of their students work; consequently, and although as a matter of principle we can't get excited about jewelry, pottery or felt, Grassimesse is always a pleasant distraction from the daily grind.
And we even saw a couple of objects we could get excited about.
And a lot of felt.
And some nice knitting by Bozen University graduate Giovanna Zanghellini.
Personalising, or at least de-anonymizing, objects through the use of knitted objects is not a new concept; socks for table and chair legs, for example, crop up with regular frequency and urban knitting is an established form of street art.
For her final year project Giovanna Zanghellini took the concept further than we've seen before and created knitted garments for chairs, tables, beds, mirrors, lamps, etc, etc, etc ...
A response to our ever more mobile world and the fact that increasing numbers of us regularly spend short periods in various locations, Abito is a wonderful attempt to help us reclaim foreign rooms as our own.
One simply takes the knitted garments from the items in your last accommodation, slips them over the furniture in your new accommodation and you have your old familiar surroundings.
As a concept wonderful, as a product impractical and unlikely - but that's not the point.
Abito is a final year project and as such is all about how the student approaches and solves the problem.
And for us Giovanna Zanghellini has done that with bravo
And without the use of felt.
Giovanna Zanghellini is now working as freelance designer in Südtirol, and if she approaches all her projects with the same competence as Abito we're sure we'll be hearing more from her in the future.
