About Vassily
A long career, then time to make.
Born in 1953, I spent my first 28 years in education, followed by a career of nearly three decades in information technology. I began as a consultant at Arthur Andersen and gradually took on management and director roles with international technology companies including JMA, TI, SSW and CA. Alongside this, I taught management courses at Antwerp Business School for 30 years.
Since retiring in October 2018, I have treated time as an invitation to create: photography, video, 3D printing, music composition, artificial intelligence, sewing and knitting. These collections are part of that continuing curiosity: practical objects made with colour, pattern, humour and care.
I was born into a family of tailors, cutters and seamstresses. I grew up around manual, hand- and foot-driven Singer sewing machines, although I was not allowed anywhere near them. The family clearly felt that following them into the trade would be a recipe for disaster.
After retirement, nostalgia drew me back towards those early memories and towards a question: might I have inherited even a little of the talent carried by the people whose genes I have had with me all my life?
Little by little, I acquired a small workshop of knitting and sewing equipment:
Knitting equipment
- Silver Reed SK280 — standard-gauge punch-card knitting machine
- Silver Reed KL150 — Knit Radar / electronic charting device
- Caydo — electric i-cord knitting machine
- Addi — circular knitting machine
- Hague Linker — linking machine
Sewing, embroidery, serging and assembly
- BERNINA L 860 — air-threading serger / overlocker with touchscreen
- Bernette B79 Yaya Han Edition — combination sewing and embroidery machine
- Juki TL-2200 — semi-industrial flatbed sewing machine
I also created spaces for them in my loft and in an old bedroom upstairs. Then I began to experiment. I have never made two identical pieces. I am drawn to experimentation and to making original work, while learning from fellow crafters — especially those generous enough to share their techniques on YouTube.
I have never sold a piece. I have no wish to turn this pleasure into a commercial activity, and have instead given most of my work to friends, family and people close to my heart. I now have less than 10% of what I have made, but I have systematically kept photographic albums on Flickr and, now, on these pages, which document most of the work.
The common thread has always been technology. My professional career in IT continues in my creative life through an Apple Silicon MacBook Pro, Adobe and other software, AI language models such as ChatGPT and Gemini, and a growing collection of creator tools and hardware: a Cricut plotter/cutter, a Flux laser, a 3D printer and YouTube. Two of my machines are computerised. Technology is not separate from what I make; it is part of the source of inspiration in almost everything I do.
