The Story Behind Our Collections - Miller Goodman

If you already know the Sisters Guild boutique, you'll know how much care and attention goes into bringing our collections together. Our dressing room is filled with wonderful clothes, our decor brings colour, inspiration, sumptuous fabrics and beautiful pieces to adorn your home. The collections brought together in our imagine and play section holds a carefully selected range of pieces that enhance play, encourage creativity and inspire children to imagine. One of our strongest beliefs is that imagination is contagious. There are wonderful and creative ways for children to play that spark the imagination and these amazing blocks are just one of them.

The brilliant Brighton based designers Zoe Miller and Dave Goodman have designed these two sets of imaginative building blocks, building blocks like no other. 

The first of the designs are the ShapeMaker set of 25 colourful, geometric design, hand printed, beautifully crafted, environmentally friendly hardwood blocks.

The blocks are made of rubber wood - a replenishable wood which feels so beautifully smooth in your hands.

The blocks can be excitingly arranged to create a menagerie of thousands of surprising creatures and endless of imaginative, engaging images that guarantee to delight children and adults of all ages. The blocks perfectly illustrate millergoodman’s commitment to combine function with the highest design principles, producing beautiful, sensitive New Classics in the children’s market.

The more recent collection takes the blocks into 3D with even more possibilities for imagination to explore...

PlayShapes is a unique modular set of 74 wooden geometric shapes which you can arrange or stack to make hundreds of 3D creations, such as animals, people, faces, vehicles, buildings and much more. The shapes also make fantastic drawing templates.

Young children will enjoy balancing the head and body shapes to make all sorts of funny creatures. Older children may prefer recreating the inventive 3D structures from the enclosed illustrations, giving them inspiration and confidence to build their own creations. The shapes are also an intriguing and imaginative plaything for adults - we've certainly had hours of fun with them at dinner parties.

Beautifully crafted from environmentally - friendly, durable rubberwood, the shapes feel soft in your hand and the flashes of colour add a modern accent. The set of shapes come in a printed, unbleached cotton drawstring bag along with a set of instructive illustrations.

Miller and Goodman clearly have an understanding of shape and colour which is not ony evident in their shapemakers but also in their books: A is for Artist, Colour, Shape

Produced in collaboration with Ella Doran and Tate UK each book explores its subject with wonderful pictures illustrations and bright colourful imagery. These books have been on our shelves at home read and reread, explored and brought to my girls an understanding of shape, colour and form.

Now my girls can explore shape, colour and form with the playshapes. And we've had to grab an extra set of the playshapes now too beacuse as soon as they're tipped out everyone in the room wants to play. The coffee table is shoved to the end of the room and the floor becomes a busy area of imaginative creations.

One of the things I love about the playshapes is that each time we play everyone creates and discovers something new, a new creature, person, scene, tower, village it is literally endless. There is even a flickr site dedicated to all the creations people have made.

Completely addictive, utterly brilliant, intriguing and imaginative the miller goodman blocks are a must for children and adults of all ages - they really are set to be an enduring design classic.

We're not alone in thinking these are genious. Miller Goodman won the gold award at the 2009 Practical Pre-School awards. Miller and Goodman say:

"We are very proud to have received a gold award for ShapeMaker with a score from the judges of 94% at the 2009 Practical Pre-School awards. This is our first industry toy award."

We believe imagination is contagious and these miller goodman shapes and blocks are a perfect example of how far your imagination can take you!

Take a look at the Flickr groups for Shapemaker and Playshapes
Discover Miller Goodman here and get creative too

If you'd like a further visual treat take a look at Zoe Miller and Dave Goodman's site Silence - their consultancy which helps creatives explore their ideas through still and moving image reference. Amazing.

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This is part of our series of blog posts about the Story Behind our Collections - why we've chosen the designers that are in the boutique and how those designers came to be.

To see a bit more of what Sisters Guild is all about take a look at the A-Z of Sisters Guild here.

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The Story Behind Our Collections - Playplax

Playplax was born in 1967 and quite by chance. The brilliant brainchild of Patrick Rylands Playplax was an idea developed from working on the design of prefabrictaed interlocking facings in ceramic and concrete. Rylands developed these facings into a free standing building which like a construction toy could be built to create a plethora of designs. Whilst on holiday from his time studying at the Royal College of Art Rylands minaturised the principle parts of this project he was working on. First he created a design in cardboard and then later in the form we all remember, the acrylic model.

Playplax consists of 48 transparent plastic slotted squares that can be pieced together as abstract structures or of real models and objects. There are a multitude of ways in which a child can be creative. Learning about structure, shape, form and balance, and with red, blue, green, yellow and clear pieces included in each set children will also learn about colour and their combinations. It is a 'toy' of exploration. A challenge for the imagination and as fascinating to adults as it is to children.

I remember playing with Playplax as a child. I remember the feeling of their perfectly smooth and light shape, and the sound they made too. I remember sitting for what must have been hours constructing a tower, a bridge, trying to create a curve and more often an abstract 'something'  that I'd give an equally abstract name to as though I had created a genius form.
We redsicovered it in the games cupboard at our mothers house and whilst we intended to let the children play we became so utterly engrossed with it oursleves. For the entire weekend our table consisted of some sort of Playplax creation. We were also happy to simply touch them whilst chatting and feeling the perspex in our hands and holding them up to the light.  It really is even more lovely to play with them in a spot where the sun can shine through.

Once we learned that Playplax was being manufactured again by a UK company there was no doubt that we would have to house it in our boutique. There were plenty of squeals when they arrived and we were able to see them in all their shining glory! It speaks so much by its design, its function, its fascinating limitlessness and its elegance, that it summarised what our imagine & play principle is;  freedom to create, to discover and above all explore imagination.

Patrick Rylands makes a point that rings true with us here at Sisters Guild: "For me", he says "one of the most important functions of a toy is to enable the child to enter into fantasy. I believe that a child can come to grips with reality through fantasy. The proverbial cardboard box is excellent because a child can make anything of it: the box suggests so little itself that the child is completely free to use his imagination. This 'less is more' principle probably applies more to toys than anything else: the doll that does everything itself does nothing for the child. I do not set out to design specifically 'educational' toys. My prime aim is to design something that will amuse children; if I achieve this then I believe the child will be learning anyway"

Sisters Guild believes that imagination is key to a child's learning and this shows in our carefully selected 'imagine & play' category whereby 'toys' are more 'tools for play' that allow the child to be free to explore with their own imagination.

As a design led company we are constantly searching for what could become the classics of the new generation.  Already a classic for previous generations we believe this love of Playplax will continue for many more to come.

Playplax is included in the permanent collection at both the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York and here in London  at the V&A and of course in the permanent collection here at Sisters Guild!

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This is part of our series of blog posts that reveal the story behind the collections and why we chose them for the Sisters Guild Boutique.

Read about more British Designs: Belle & Boo and ilovegorgeous