About

Gemma Harrison is a designer maker with a first class degree in textile design and a background in fashion and interiors.

While working in the textiles industry in London, she was repeatedly seeing vast quantities of perfectly good fabric and leather going to waste. This included production offcuts, surplus samples, deadstock, and 'faulty' fabric. Bags-full of perfectly good fabric, destined for landfill.

In response, Gemma began collecting these materials and built Dappled Shade, an accessories brand rooted in reuse, resourcefulness, and craft.

She designs and makes bags, jewellery, and custom pieces entirely from these reclaimed textiles, and entirely by hand. Her process is slow and considered, guided by the material itself.

Gemma’s work as a volunteer with charity Fine Cell Work, teaching embroidery and canvas work in prisons, as a means of
rehabilitation, has fostered her use of bespoke embroidery and appliqué in her own work.