horses | HAWTHORNE & HEANEY

Once in a while, we get asked to produce something a bit out of the ordinary and this is one such project that ticks all the boxes for us; embroidery, heraldry, animals. We have been working on a piece for a dressage costume for a ‘Nutcracker’ themed performance for which we produced a scarlet red saddle cloth to finish off the outfit.

We started by taking some measurements and fitting the model for her piece, she was somewhat confused by the process…

The draft was then refashioned in the right fabrics, a mixture of heavy calico and melton military cloth with a gold lace trim.

We also machine embroidered this HH monogram in raised gold thread which was then applied.

And a few action shots of the big performance

Recently, we have been working on an unusual side project that we thought we would share with you. Our director, Miss Claire Barrett has dusted off her equestrian skills and taken up Polo with the London Alumni Polo Club. The subsequent addiction to this rather dangerous new hobby has led to Hawthorne & Heaney sponsoring the London Alumni Polo Team.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the sport, it is a game on horseback, with four players on each team hitting a hard ball with a wooden mallet to score points. Polo is always played right handed and each game is divided into periods called ‘chukkas’, seven minutes long. Players wear a helmet, white trousers, boots, knee pads and of course polo shirt of the teams colours which is where Hawthorne & Heaney stepped in to help!

Machine embroidery is not something that H&H does very often but when we do, we do it well. The logo is digitized piece by piece by our inhouse machine embroiderer relying on her London College of Fashion training in a computer drawing program similar to Illustrator. This then gets uploaded to the CAD/CAM machine to be tested multiple times through the sampling process until it is perfect before it is applied to the shirts themselves. The gentlemen are sporting the full Hawthorne and Heaney logo while the ladies have a more delicate H&H version proudly worn on the right arm. Both logos centre around our soon to be famous Hawthorne tree.

Below are the London Alumni Polo Team in Chantilly modelling their new shirts with the large and small H&H logos on the arm. We like to think that we were integral to their sucess at the event where they took away two trophies !

Hawthorne & Heaney Does Dressage Costumes

The London Alumni Polo Team