'F'LOATY' ART: Wellington design student Jenny Leov with an album of her fabric designs.

TEXTILE design student Jenny Leov loves cranes.

Lucky for her then, Wellington’s working barge with crane, the Hikitia, was moored on the waterfront until recently, and randomly caught her eye.

It was the inspiration for a seven metre piece of fabric now on her newly created website.

“I have a fascination with trees and industrial stuff, so I ran with it,” she says.

Her four-year degree in textile design wraps up in October and she needs to produce an exhibition to showcase her work.

She calls her art “floaty” and says it is about putting pattern into repetition with a natural component.

Jenny, 28, who lives above the Wellington Zoo’s lion pit in Melrose, says when things jump out (not lions) she builds on it, thinking about boldness and colour, then plays with different proportions to create a process that can be quite random.

Jenny says her exhibition will have a dreamlike ascetic:. “I am documenting my dreams, with a mix of things like photos and illustrative applications.”

Jenny’s passion for art has been longstanding. As a child she knew about colour, partly learned from sitting at the kitchen table with her family, cutting out images from magazines and pasting them up.

Before her degree, she studied design in Melbourne at night classes.

During the third year of her degree at Massey University, an opportunity arose to travel to a textile trade fair in Paris, Premier Vision, to “see what was going on in the world”.

In 2009, in a degree class exercise in design, her choice from “gross, over-crafted’’ lucky dips inspired her to make a fabric entrant for the Hokonui Fashion Design Awards in Gore,.

She also fulfilled her itchy traveller’s feet and studied in Scotland for a semester through the university’s exchange programme.

Jenny has just finished designing her own website, which displays her work and enables her to be a freelance designer for clients to buy special one-off art pieces.

Her current project is for a woman who wants a lace-inspired print, meaning detailed research at the library.

She likes to keep it natural with silk, cotton or linen home-wares, and canvas for durability.

The ultimate for Jenny would be living in New York and working for Marimekko Corporation, the Finnish design house.

“It’s hard to think I could do all this fulltime with New Zealand so small. Working overseas means I am taken more seriously.”

But first, that exhibition: “I have a lot of work to produce in a small amount of time – it’s going to be really full on.”