Around here lately

I've been looking forward to today for a while, three or four weeks actually. Two huge deadlines were today, and somehow I finished right on time. I'm breathing a little more freely, and actually looking forward to running some errands, taking care of some office work, and hopefully getting out of my studio to see some of this beautiful Spring going on outside. I wish I'd had more time to create new work for Surtex, but there is always next year. And honestly, Adobe creative suite and I need some time apart. I've been making some mental lists of what I want to try my hand at next now that my work slate is clean once again, and I decided I want to make time every day to practice with my canon. It intimidates me quite a bit, but I'm trying to shoot in manual. This photo is the view from one of our upstairs windows. I love that chiminey covered in vines and flowers. Every once in a while, it is covered completely in red blooms. I just think it is so charming.

Have a great weekend. Hope it's sunny where you live!

Any advice for a 2D girl in a 3D world?

One of my hardest classes at SCAD was a foundation class called 3D Design. It was my first or second quarter there, and this class just drove me insane with worry. It seriously frightened me. Maybe I couldn't handle art school. Maybe I'd just been delusional in little old Merritt Island, thinking I could handle these conceptual classes once I got to college. My roommate and I took the class together, thank goodness. She was much better at making a pleasing three dimensional form out of planes of paper taped together. Hers actually looked pretty, as opposed to mine that just looked like... paper taped together. The final was on Tybee Island at the beach. In groups we had designed kites that had to fly for a certain amount of time and meet all these other qualifications. None of the kites flew. I remember going home at the end of that quarter exhausted from the anxiety of that paper kite. Thankfully, my classes were soon all two dimensional again, and so it all got a lot easier, kind of. Ha.

Now, like then, I design two dimensional things like fabric, wallpaper and greeting cards. Meanwhile my husband, an industrial designer, creates things like power tools, bed bug detectors and medical devices. Joseph would have loved that 3D class, and been awesome at making that [dumb] kite. He has wanted a 3D printer forever, and he finally bought one last week. It will be here soon, and for the life of me, I just can't think of anything I'd like to make. I think in 2D, in patterns and drawings. What can I make that could incorporate patterns? If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear! Maybe it will help me overcome the anxiety of designing in three dimensions :)

Hidden Wallpaper

Do you know what I love the most, pattern-wise, besides a good floral? Seriously, one of my favorite things ever is unexpected pattern, a fun lining in a bag or even a tiny stripe inside the lapel of a shirt. Love it. 

So, when I received some approval samples for my designs for removable wallpaper from Hygge & West, I thought for days about where I could stick the 12" wide  strips. I realized yesterday that they were the perfect size to stick inside my linen cabinet at the top of the stairs. 

I already loved this cabinet. My mom bought it for me as an early Christmas present the last time she was in town. It was a bright primary blue with plastic handles and lots of scuff marks. We snagged it for only $55, and I painted it this warm gray the same afternoon. I added some Hobby Lobby pulls, and finally we had another place to store textiles, ha! We did really need the storage though. Normal town home's are definitely not known for their closet space, and I was spending all my money on hoarding textiles before I even had any furniture as a single lady. People always said how sad my apartment was when they came inside. Not a good thing. Thankfully I soon found a roommate who came with a couch.  

When I was ready to apply the wallpaper, I was so excited at the perfectness of my plan, that I accidentally put BOTH wallpaper pieces on upside down. First of all, I drew this pattern. If anyone in the world should know that this was being installed upside down, it should have been me. Thankfully, the wallpaper really truly is very removable and re-stickable. I left the black side upside down so that the patterns on both sides would be a little different. The print of each colorway is the same section of the pattern. I used a credit card to smooth out the wallpaper tiles, and it was really easy. Too easy, because now I want to put them everywhere!

New Removable Wallpaper Tiles from Hygge & West!

(Garden wallpaper from Hygge & West)

Removable Wallpaper is here! It's very exciting. Hygge & West just launched the new tiles, and it is such a fantastic idea. I'm excited for H&W in general, but also for all of us wallpaper lovers! I'm (ridiculously) not always on board for new technological advancements. "What was so wrong with the old way," the lazy learner in me laments, and, "I just figured out this new perspective tool in Photoshop and here comes CS6." That said, peel and stick wallpaper is, duh, just awesome. The fuchsia colorway of my Garden design (above) was a sample we tried last year for the first run of screen printed traditional wallpaper sampling. It was ok, not my favorite of all the options because the beautiful very slight smudginess that comes from screenprinting on traditional paper works with some colors and not with others. The crispness of the design is perfect on this removable paper, and now the design can handle the bright fuchsia color. It's so cool to see that this colorway is included in the new product line. Here are all the colors available in the Garden design, and you can see all the new removable wallpaper options from Hygge & West right here.

Trends come and go, but birds are sticking around

This week I was digging around in some old files from my job as a textile designer. I was looking for examples of past work to show a client, and let me tell you, there were many a suzani rug designs in those files. A few years ago, suzanis were all the rage in home decor. Some of the other ethnic prints that were also popular then are still going strong, like ikats. But what happened to the suzani? I for one, am aiming to bring it back. I made this folksy group, and threw in a folksy suzani design (under the polka dot). It's a modern, folk, songbird, floral filled collection, and it will be at Surtex with my agent in a few weeks.