The 2011 London Design Festival has just come to an end, and I’ve been watching from afar, a little in awe of this years amazing programme. Now in its ninth year, it is a showcase for the best of furniture, interi¬ors, textiles, craft, graphics, fashion, and architecture. Phewi.

The V&A Museum is the Festivals main hub venue, with Tent at the Old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, Shoreditch, the unofficial HQ for East London’s Design Festival.

My favourite installation from this years festival has been the V&A’s showpiece this year.

Naturally, it’s a textile installation.

Frances most accomplished design duo, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec,  in collaboration with Kvadrat, are responsible for this stunning installation in the V & A Museum, intended to provide a space to “lounge” while contemplating the surrounding Raphael Cartoons Gallery in a more relaxed setting. The textile installation is 30 meters long and 8 meters wide, and takes up over 240sqm of the floor of the famous gallery floor.

Today our new bespoke and limited edition organic childrenswear label Little Bird, Little Bird took flight. Yippee!

What’s Little Bird, Little Bird all about? Well, for years, customers have asked us to design a childrenswear range, it was on ‘the list’. The list was very long!

In October 2010 I gave birth to my first child, Quincy...or Little Miss Q, as she is known to us. There’s nothing like having a baby to focus you, and in the moments between sleeping and feeding and the general mayhem of being a new mum, I wanted to make something special for her. She is such a gorgeous little poppet. Well, two and two makes four ......Little Bird, Little Bird just kinda happened.

My greatest inspiration comes from children....seeing how switched on they are to the changes we need to make. Our future lies with the children….and they are really clued up when it comes to sustainability and taking care of this planet we live on. It made sense to make sustainable fashion for little people.

ODE  1. A lyric poem in the form of an address to a particular subject, often elevated in style or manner, written in varied or irregular meter and expressive of exalted or enthusiastic emotion. 2. A poem meant to be sung.

Many of you will know that I grew up in Wales. That’s Old South Wales, rather than New South Wales. The land of song.  ‘We’ll keep a welcome in the hillside, we’ll keep a welcome in the vales, this land you knew will still be singing, when you come home again to Wales....’ Sigh.

This Christmas I’ll be going home for Christmas in Wales. We are taking our daughter home to the land of song for the very first time.

So it seems kinda fitting to share a special bit of Wales with you today. To share with you a building whose structure ebbs and flows with the songs of Wales, encapsulating the heart and soul of its nation.

Nuala O’Donovan is a young potter from Cork in Ireland.

She graduated in Three Dimensional Design from Middlesex University in 1994, and a Masters in Ceramics in 2008. She works in clay.

Her fascination with the shapes and forms in flowers, trees, snow crystals is based on an interest in fractal geometries and mathematical formulas. It is the irregular patterns in nature which she uses as a system of constraint when creating these amazing ceramic artworks. The scars, burns, wrinkles, flaw caused by unique experience.

In her artist statement she explains, ‘The evidence of a response to random events visible in patterns in nature, is testament to the ability of living organisms to recover, to respond, and to continue growing and changing. It is the imperfections in the patterns caused by a unique experience that are evidence of the life force in living organisms.’.

We love.