Hand-Made in Tel Aviv: Introducing Shira Paz

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After graduating from the industrial design department at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Tel Aviv-based Shira Paz decided to put a new spin to traditional techniques and reimport them in our times.

After experimenting with different textiles and materials, she came up with a simple accessory, a handmade scarf in merino wool that has been hand-spun and hand-dyed using ancient methods. Paz's experiments prove that a genuinely creative yarn is made not only during the spinnning phase, but also during the dyeing process.

The designer recently created a collection of scarves (all of them available from Paz's Etsy shop) in which, thanks to the hand spinning and dyeing processes, each piece is unique and characterised by deeper or lighter hues and by a varying degree of thickness.

What's the best lesson you learnt at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design?
Shira Paz: “Make it simple”.

What fascinates you about textiles and textile jewellery in particular?
Shira Paz: Textiles imply colours and textures, and that's what interests me, making my heart beats go wild and my mind flow with inspirations. I’m not the sort of girl you can impress with diamonds, while I feel that textile jewellery can make a statement, it will always have an interesting look and special tactile qualities as well. I love the fact that you can combine different materials and textures in one piece.

What inspired your collection of scarves?
Shira Paz: My scarves collection was the first collection I launched as an independent designer. Because of my background as an industrial designer, I find myself all the time looking around at well-known, everyday objects surrounding me, and I try to see them from a fresh perspective. I usually look at something, find a problem with it and search for an innovative solution. That's exactly what happened with this collection: I looked at my good old scarf and wondered if I could find a simpler way to wear it and still look fashionable. I wanted to offer people a fresher interpretation of the ordinary scarf both on the functional and aesthetic levels.

Why did you opt for merino yarn to make it?
Shira Paz: I used 100% thick and thin, hand-dyed and hand-spun merino yarn for various reasons. Its look - the varying thicknesses and the vibrant hand-dying make a distinctive and one of a kind look. Although the scarf is thick, you can barely feel it, the merino yarn is indeed extremely lightweight and supersoft like cotton. Besides, I really love the feel and look of natural materials.

What kind of traditional methods are employed to make this yarn?
Shira Paz: The yarn I used is hand-spun by distaff and spindle and hand-dyed in big boiling metal pots, exactly like decades ago.

Each scarf is individually made by hand, how important is it for you to make things by hand in our times?
Shira Paz: There are things that no machine can do, for example the varying thicknesses. Machines would do them very accurately, once thick and once thin, but doing it by hand expands the range between thick and thin, and offers a designer the chance to obtain more degrees of thickness, rarely the same ones. I love the fact that each scarf is one of kind; I’m also a big fan of “wabi sabi” , I believe there’s beauty in imperfection and that's created through traditional processes such as hand-dyeing and spinning. I also think that, creating and producing by hand you transfer your energy into the object and material you're working on, and that's a thing that no machine can do!

Which are the benefits that a young designer like you can gain from producing a collection in accordance with the principles of slow fashion?
Shira Paz: By producing according to the principles of slow fashion you can create fresh, unique, high quality and timeless designs. As a result you offer to your customers differentiation, and being different for a young designer means that you distance yourself from the others and get noticed.

What's the fashion scene like in Tel Aviv and which are your favourite Israeli designers?
Shira Paz: There’s a lot going on in the fashion scene in Tel Aviv, because Israel is a small country, and there is only one academy for fashion design. There are a lot of talented designers in the city; my favorite Israeli designers are plastic accessories brand Medusa, Tamar Shalem Shoes and textile designer Lee Coren.