3 posts tagged “bedding”

I did this pattern for one of my customers. She wanted to do her nursery in a jungle theme, and couldn't find a bedding set that she liked. So I designed this based on the colors she had already chosen for the nursery. All the plants are based on real African leaves and flowers. Here's the original pattern, plus a couple of variations on the colorways.

I started doing patterns for commercial purposes when I began working with Basic Comfort (a Denver-based kids' product manufacturer) on the Grow for BC collections. Those patterns were mostly pretty basic -- stripes, dots, wavy lines, all with that hand-drawn edge that I love. They were definitely more traditional than I would prefer to be doing, though, and were mostly designed to be different (but not TOO different from the bedding sets that were already being 

sold in places like Babies R Us.) However, they were too different, and we had a hard time getting them into those big mass merchant stores. The bedding sets were picked up by Target.com, Amazon.com and some boutique retailers, but they never broke past that barrier of getting shelf space in a big store.

I think part of the problem was that Basic Comfort did not have a reputation for being a bedding manufacturer, so they were really breaking into a new business. They didn't have established relationships with bedding buyers, or historical sales information, or any of those things that (at the time) I didn't know were important. And Basic Comfort didn't have sales relationships with boutiques, which in retrospect is where we should have started trying to sell these new sets. Here are a few of those patterns.

I've always loved patterns, and have been drawing them since I was a tiny kid. I have a plaster-headed, faux-fur bodied puppet that I made when I was in kindergarten, and it's head is covered with circles filled with abstract patterns. If I can find it in the basement I'll put up a pic of it.

I do have a picture of a drawing I did as a gift for my favorite second-grade teacher, Miss McGee.She was kind enough to track me down about 8 years ago and return the drawing, which was really neat since I didn't haveanything quite like that in my kid-art portfolio. I drew a dragon in seventh grade, which is also filled with abstract patterns, and gave circle drawings to my favorite teachers in middle school also. Like Henry's notebooks, my school books throughout my entire educational career are filled with doodles and patterns and not too much in the way of schoolwork.

So it seems very comfortable to be designing patterns again, and I love it. I've continued to do a few pen-and-ink drawings through the years, mostly as charity auction donations, and they've all been fish filled with patterns. Why fish? I don't know, but I recently discovered that my friend Kelton had also been drawn to fish throughout his artistic life.

I didn't ever consider that I could design patterns commercially, until just recently. They always just seemed like a fun artistic distraction that could be made into fine art when needed, but I knew I wasn't going to be a fine artist. I've always been more interested in large scale production for my work, maybe because I began as a graphic designer. Just recently I've discovered that there are people who are "pattern designers." I know that seems like it should be really obvious, especially for someone like me who has been in the kids' products and textile industry for such a long time. But I always felt like I had to produce something that used the patterns that I designed myself -- bedding, or placemats, or stationary. And that's what I've been doing with Grow ever since.