Crafty student wins textile design award

A packet of craft foam worth $4 has proved very valuable to third-year fine arts student Ms Rhiannon Smith, who has won the 2006 Craft Victoria Flinders Quarter student award for the design of textile accessories.

Ms Smith said she chose to investigate the notion of preciousness and how expensive materials can dictate an object's worth.

"Through strong repetition of a detailed form, I hope to alter that perception and show how the non-precious can be transformed and given a sense of worth," she said.

Ms Smith won the high-profile award, held in association with Melbourne Spring Fashion Week and themed Hand Worked to Wear, for a delicate necklace, hand cut and threaded from craft foam she spotted on one of her regular 'laps' around a Spotlight store.

The $1000 prize money has enabled her to buy materials for a new studio she will be sharing with fellow students in the Flinders Quarter -- the area of Melbourne around Flinders Street renowned for its designers and after which the award is named.

But Ms Smith said that for her, the award's value was more than just the prize and the kudos that had come with it.

"The process I went through to make it was also what made it very precious to me because there was quite a lot of time spent on it," she said.

Ms Smith's entry for the award -- an initiative of the Flinders Quarter Association and managed by Craft Victoria -- is made up of multiple 'snowflake' forms she created as part of her third-year metals and jewellery studies.

"Part of the project was that we made the same piece in three or four different materials. I wanted to play with movement and was quite obsessed with the shade of white," she said. "Another piece was made of a spongier foam and another was made out of doilies."