Cushions!

I'm very excited to announce that I'm going to be doing the Melbourne Design Market this year! Alongside Bianca and some other talented folk, I'm going to have a selection of products available on the Bamakko stand, which I will be helping to man on the day. I've never done a market before, so this will certainly be jumping in the deep end!

As a result, I've been focusing on some product development. Next in line - cushions! I really like how the houses & bicycles print looks on them - very whimsical and apt for a kids room or any other cute, colourful spot in the house. I've popped a few up in my shop to see how they go:


Houses & Bicycles cushion in Orange (softie by One Red Robin)


Houses & Bicycles cushion in Robins Egg


Houses & Bicycles cushion in Teal

I'm only selling the covers for now as the inserts are a waste of postage, but plan to get some nice feather & foam inserts for market day :)

Monday's lineup

I managed to eek out what little sunshine came into our living room this morning in order to finally take these photos. New fabrics to appear in the shop on Monday!

Firstly, Houses & Bicycles in lots of colourways:


Houses & Bicycles in Teal on cream


Houses & Bicycles in Robins Egg Blue on cream


Houses & Bicycles in Oranges on cream


Houses & Bicycles in Chocolate on seed

And some old favourites:


Birch Forest in Robins Egg Blue on cream


Birch Forest in Gold on cream


in Robins Egg Blue on cream


Riverside Adventures in Gold on cream

I'll be popping this lot up into the shop at about 10:00am Monday 23rd. It's a very whimsy themed update I reckon.

Oh - quick question! The houses print is available full width for once! Do you want it available in both full and half width?

Quilt in progress

Aww you guys were all very sweet with your nice words about my simple quilt! As a result I was very inspired to keep on working on it today (sometimes when I should have been working). I got the whole top finished - yay!

Jenaveve asked if I could show some work-in-progress shots, so here they are:


Sewing together strips of squares. See the tiny, featherweight old machine I work on every day? I'm not sure how it will handle the quilting part but I reckon it sends a good message to the "oh but my tools aren't good enough!" style procrastinators out there ;)


Strips of squares laid out on the couch


Strips of squares after ironing the seams flat


Sewing the strips together - the squares actually lined up! Mostly...


Back of the quilt-top, seams ironed flat. I actually really like the colours here - all shades of natural/cream linen with bits of colour in between :)


Yay quilt top finished!


Experimenting with different backing and binding options...


Another option (hello... is that new fabric??? More on that tomorrow!)

And that's all so far! Don't be surprised if I totally run out of steam and there's no more updates for a few weeks ;)

oh so ground breaking stuff

The cool thing about having a little fabric mafia is that we can ride on each other's successes. After Shannon did something oh-so-groundbreaking and printed light ink on dark cloth (our printer had concerns about quality, but it turned out to be fine), Bianca and I followed suit :)


Ginkgo in Snow

I've been dying to print white ink on natural fabric for ages now, and I love the results! Given that the ink is opaque, it's tactile and sits more on the surface of the fabric. To me this helps emphasize the screen printed nature of the fabric and helps set it apart from digitally printed stuff. Especially because with digital you can't print light on dark cloth. Yay!


Ginkgo in Red Orange


More mix packs ahoy

Anyway, I reckon this lot will go up in the shop on Monday morning, along with some other goodies (including some more mix packs and some Birch Forest).

Let's say Monday 26th, 10:00am Melbourne time?

red and green things

I've still been in a bit of a funk this week. Not my usual chirpy self, instead being emotional and swearing at things. My design work is coming along nicely though so maybe it fits with that old adage about artists doing their best work when they're feeling down ;)

In lighter news, here's some red and green things that are making me happy:


Some freshly potted herbs and Cyclamen for the balcony. I always love that european red-flowers-in-planter-box thing, and these Cyclamen weren't too expensive and apparently love the cold. Perfect!


A gorgeous handbound book sent to me by Nicole of Freshly Blended. Sooo cute, and so well made! It's related to a little collaboration we've got in the works :)

Aaand...


... a new shoulderbag from Mattt! This one features the limited edition ginkgo print on natural hemp canvas. It was a custom job for Mattt, which is why I had a bit of the print on cream available last week. He also has this print in Pumpkin, and you buy them online here.

I've got more Ginkgo on the way actually, in another new colourway. Exciting :)

Rainy Day in Autumn

Oh my gosh, 103 comments and suggestions on my last post! Thank you all SO much for your name suggestions, they were brilliant! Definitely kept me entertained over the weekend. I loved all the suggestions that related to trees and forest (I love trees, did you know?) but in the end I just couldn't get past the fact that it looks like rain to me.

So ..... I decided to go with 'Rainy Day in Autumn' :) 'Rainy Day' as the print name, and Autumn as the colourway, so later I can do Spring and Summer etc, as per Retro Age Vintage Fabric's suggestion.

Some free fabric will be heading over to Mia for the name, and Retro Age Vintage Fabric for the colourway/theme. Send me your details - thanks so much girls!



On that note, the shop is updated right now! I'm sorry that the price of Rainy Day is a little more expensive than usual - although I reduced costs on screens, 4 colours still costs more to print. But I think it's totally worth it :)

new fabric print - yay!!

I have been waiting for this for what feels like SO long. Finally my new 4 colour print has come back from the printers, and I am so happy with how it turned out. Here's a little preview!



One of my favourite things about this print is that all 4 colours are printed off the one screen. Tricky and complicated yet fun to set up! It helps keep the production cost down and makes multiple colour prints actually affordable.



There's only one problem though. I have NO idea what to call the print, and what to call the colourway! I've already done a print called "raindrops" so I can't use that. I was thinking something like 'rain', 'water', or just 'drops'. Or 'winter rain' which describes the colour at the same time... but maybe thats too depressing.

Anyway, I'm totally open to suggestions at this point. If you manage to suggest a name or colourway that I end up using for this print - I'll send you a free piece of the fabric :)

Hopefully something will be decided before Monday 28th, 9am Melbourne time, which is when I'm putting this up in the shop :)

little tags for mix packs

Thanks everyone for the lovely comments about my sketchbook! Definitely inspires me to turn some of those drawings into actual things. Looks like the 'book tree' is number one :)

I finally got around to making some more fabric mix packs this week. For awhile now I've been unhappy with the presentation of the packs - it seemed a bit stale, not cute enough. I like the idea of putting the fabrics in a cute little bundle, but you have to be careful doing that because if the thickness exceeds 2cm it becomes a 'parcel' rather than a 'letter' and therefore a gazillion times more expensive.

Anyway, I think I've found a good middle ground. And with the addition of some old fashioned swingtags (gocco printed at midnight last night), I think they look much better all round.





I'll be putting these up in the shop probably Monday 28th :)

Gocco tip - I've often had problems with the large solid areas of my prints being a bit patchy. I believe this is due to excess carbon in the original artwork which overheats and stick to the screen. However - there's some special stuff you can get called "Artwork Clean-up Paper". It looks suspiciously like baking paper and you iron it over your original and it lifts the excess carbon off. Worked for me!

waiting waiting

Wow it's been a great week for publicity this week! Thanks to both Ahn-minh and Janel from Apartment Therapy for featuring my lamps this week - that's awesome. I love how everyone likes a bit of tutorial action :)

I'm feeling super frustrated at the mo though whilst I wait to get some new basecloth to print on. I just found one that's really lovely but they're out of stock! And my other supplier isn't getting their shipment in till the end of March. That feels like FOREVER away. Sigh. So anyway, no new fabric will be appearing in the shop for a little while - sorry about that.

Just for a bit of colour with this post - my inspiration wall, which is looking very bird themed at the mo:


(the bird prints are from the yumi yumi etsy shop!)

first batch o' 2008

I've been eagerly awaiting this latest print run - some reprints of my favourite & most popular prints and colourways. And the best bit is that the colours all go well together - I like it when that happens:



There's plenty of Ginkgo again this time. I've made a slight adjustment and made the robins egg blue colour slightly greener. It goes better with the olive green. Plus, this time the printers managed to get a wonderful 'overprint' effect on both the colourways , so you can see the dots through the leaves like I originally imagined. Yay :)

I'll be putting these ones up in the shop first thing Monday morning - 9:00am Melbourne time. Hope to see you there :) :)

xx

Couldn't resist...

I know it's borderline narcissistic of me, but I couldn't resist purchasing this gorgeous Peg Bear Salsa from Jhoanna of One Red Robin. It is just tooooo cute!! He will sit in my office and keep me company. I hope she makes some more of these cuties!!


Peg Bear by One Red Robin

Hey come to think of it, he makes a great form of advertising for my next shop update! I have a couple of rolls of bulokku in robins egg and burnt orange that I've been meaning to put up for ages now. I just wanted to get the new shop 'broken in' first. So the next update will be this Thursday at 9:00am Melbourne time!

Thanks to everyone who bought some of the fabric mix packs and also gave me some critical feedback on the new shop. I've now included a 'sold items' section like on etsy so people can see what they've missed. Any other suggestions - keep them coming!

xo

Good mail day

Often I find myself compulsively checking the mailbox 2 or 3 times a day. Even when I know it's too early for the postie to have come, or impossible for him to have come between then and the last time I checked.

But today when I got back home (after putting in my first ever pair of contact lenses - OMG so good!) I was finally rewarded with some much anticipated exciting mail:


These gorgeous prints from the yumi yumi etsy shop. Much much better in person - I need a better camera!!


Some much awaited swatches from www.pickhemp.com. Piles and piles of beautiful hemp/linen/organic cotton based fabric swatches. And decent prices too! Only problem is that the shipping costs might really blow the price out. Just waiting to hear back on that now. Fingers crossed!!

purse v 2.0

Despite the fiddliness of attaching the frame last time, I really enjoyed making the Japanese kit purse so decided to make another with some of my own fabric:



Thanks to the lovely commenter Michaela who directed me to this tute, I discovered that you can also attach purse frames with fabric glue. Which sounds messy and disastrous, but really turned out to be quite easy. Especially with aid of UHU all purpose adhesive, which is jelly like and quite forgiving in the early stages (eg you can shift the fabric around and wipe the glue off easily before it sets).



If I can get my hands on some good purse frames here (I bought the one above in Nagoya and it's much slimmer than any I've found online), maybe I'll put together some kits. With fabric, interlining, purse frame, pattern and instructions... what do you think?

Hello 2008

Hello 2008. I'm looking forward to seeing what you have in store for me this year. I've been doing a lot of thinking and I reckon I'm definitely going to keep growing the textile production side of my business. Get into production of homewares etc and see how it goes. I've found someone who can possibly do sewing for me, and that is very, very exciting :)

It feels like forever though that I've had time to sit down and actually create some new designs. The last few days have been quiet, so I've had a chance to play around with some of the ideas that have been stuck in my head. I'm not 100% on all of them yet, but it was fun to sit down and play again:








UPDATE: just replaced this last pattern with the above - much better :)

Definitely Nap Time

Phew. It's the end of a long and exhausting week. Yes I know, I don't have kids that wake me up at 5:30am but I'm still tiiiiired. I've spent the last four days basically being a packaging girl and postal worker, and I'm so pleased to say that all orders are in the mail. My theory is that if I get to the P.O. before they open and am first in line at the door, then I can feel less guilty about using up one of the service counters for a full 20 minutes even if the line goes out the door, as it frequently does.

Anyway, what else has been going on around here? Ooh I got to meet some of the lovely girls at the recently opened Thread Den, and have already given them a bunch of my stuff - yay.



Thread Den is a retail space for vintage and local designer clothing and accessories, a sewing lounge with machines for hourly hire and lessons, and a hub for emerging designers in general. I think they will do well :)



What else? Oh last night was the Christmas Shopping Spectacular at Mikes which was a heap of fun. Lots of new people to meet, and plenty of white wine to keep me chatty (too chatty?) and give me a nice hangover to nurse today. I can't hold my liquor anymore it seems.

And then there's this awesome bag and lovely post by one of my favorite craftisans - Abby Jane of While She Naps, which I'm mightily chuffed about - Thanks Abby!


Tote bag by Abby Jane

And finally - time for a much needed break! I'm off to Sydney with a girly friend for a few days which should be so nice and relaxing. However I reckon the highlight of the trip will be catching up with Kristen who is going to take me to lots of cool places like Cloth. That should be very inspiring.

On that rambling note, I'm off! Thanks to everyone for your really kind words about the new fabric and for helping to empty my shop (mostly) yet again! I am always blown away by the support :)

oops!

I was sitting at my computer at 7:30 this morning doing shop-related calculations thinking - something's not quite right here. I've sold most of what I put up in my shop yesterday, but I'm only just breaking even with my production costs.

And then I figured it out. I only listed in my shop HALF of what I actually have! For example I entered 10 quantities (5m) instead of 10 metres!

So, to anyone who missed out on something they wanted, there's more in the shop right now! If you've already placed an order and you'd like me to combine shipping - just include a note to the seller and I'll send you a revised invoice (it'll only be $1 less, but hey :) ).

Sorry about that!

fabrics in the shop

The shop is now healthily stocked up with the new Bulokku print and some other old faves:



The Birch Forest has all sold out in a snap though. I really need to do something about that. Birch is printed from the same screen as Riverside Adventures which doesn't sell quite so well, so I think it's time to separate them!

I can either find another design to print alongside it (maybe My Little Town??) or, I can modify the Birch to be full width. I'd probably do this by increasing the scale of the design slightly and adding more branches at the top. But I'm not sure - would that design really work 1.5m tall?? Is a full width Birch fabric even useful to crafters? Would love to hear people's thoughts on the matter...

Ginkgo

Thank you to everyone who commented on my pricing post the other day. I really appreciate your honesty when it comes to such matters - especially tough ones like that.

Meanwhile, the shop has been cleared of fabric yet again and I worked hard this weekend to get all the orders packaged and posted off before I get swept away with other commitments. Really glad to have got that all done.

So, onto something new. Since I started producing textiles, there are three things that I have always aspired to achieve. 1- to print on a really lovely, natural feeling base cloth. 2- to print a 2 colour design, and 3, to produce a design that I feel wholeheartedly confident about and proud of.

And finally, at the risk of sounding conceited, I think I've finally managed to pull off all of those three things:





I'm reeeeally happy with how this one turned out. I was fretting about it for ages until I finally got it back from the printers and saw how the colour & scale turned out. I really hope you like it too.

I need a bit of a break before doing another shop update, so these two colourways will be up in the shop maybe Thursday or Friday this week, along with some mix packs. I'll confirm the time later on :)

a long day

It has been somewhat of a mammoth day! The shop has been cleared out of all fabric except for some of the gold raindrops and poppies. Which is funny because they were my favs! But each to their own :)

This morning was more stressful than usual - Etsy threw it's hands up in the air a couple of times when two people tried to buy the same item at once, dropping items out of their cart and all sorts of things. Many upset emails were received. But all was smoothed out in the end.

In the midst of it all, my letterpress tags made their way up into the shop also:



Thanks again to Lynn from Satsuma Press for doing the printing :)



Definitely time to clock off. Dumplings and Kareoke time I think...

New fabric and a note about pricing

New fabric is in the shop right now!





Now, I don't assume for a second that you guys haven't noticed my prices steadily increasing over the year. Pricing is a really difficult subject and something I do a lot of thinking, research and stressing about. This time, the prices have gone up again for a few reasons. 1, to accommodate the fact that the USD has been weakening, and with Etsy forcing us to list in USD us Aussies have been losing out. 2, to be more fair to my wholesale customers and not be undercutting them so much (thanks to Bianca and Craft Inc. for this advice!). And 3 to be more fair to myself, if I want to be able to make an actual living out of doing this. So yeah. Prices will continue to go up slowly, but will stop when they reach a point that's fair for all :) I promise it won't be crazy expensive :)