In my final year my major project was centred around the Derbyshire landscape where I grew up, my home. But looking at it through the lens of the author Jane Austen as she wrote about it for her characters in her best-known novel, ‘Pride and Prejudice’. I am intrigued by the Bennett family, a cohesive unit that slots perfectly into the landscape. Not being a wealthy family, everything they do is to perpetuate and sustain their existence in the precarious comfort of their farm. They battle their landscape but are completely at home within it. I wanted to take this concept of a self-sustaining lifestyle and apply it to my work. With this collection I purposefully stepped away from the concept of fast fashion. I didn’t want to feed any more into the cycles that continually demand new. Instead of designing for a single season I chose to design for a lifestyle. Consequently, most of my fabrics have been sourced from charity shops or been donated by people that are aware of my work. fabrics that can't be sourced have been bought from shops that deal only in sustainable and ethical products. Specialising in stitching manipulation using techniques both modern and old, my designs offer a second life to these fabrics. Combining these reclaimed fabrics with traditional techniques is my way of appreciating what has gone before and showing that is not irrelevant but worthy of retaining meaning in our culture. Celebrating it for what we can use it for in the context of today.