Sunday, August 30, 2009

Love Hate and Amy Butler

I have a love/hate relationship with Amy Butler.



I love her because she makes awesome fabric designs that I could only dream of coming up with. There's barely been anything she's done that I haven't instantly liked. Kudos, Amy.



The problem is, well - I really like her...... but so do about a zillion other people. The market is absolutely and completely saturated with people using Amy Butler fabrics. To the point that despite loving her work, I absolutely refuse to use any of her designs in any work I do. Point blank refuse.

This problem is not solely with Amy Butler either. I remember loving Joel Dewberry's 'Sparrows' fabric instantly when I first saw it...... and then I saw it everywhere, and now I'm completely turned off it. Maybe I'm a bit pig-headed about being a tiny bit original, but as soon as I see other people using a fabric I really like I instantly find myself all ho-hum about it.




And so I scour the internet for stuff I haven't seen before. God, I spend hours trawling for stuff that I both like and haven't seen anyone else use. Of course I haven't found too many of these fabrics because I'm quite stringent with what I'll let into my fabric stash. Even the ones I previously liked can fall out of favour with me. Not so good when I've got a couple of metres of the stuff sitting in my box.

So, in order to get some original fabric that I like - what better way than to get some of my own made?

I've suggested a collaboration with my artist friend Chrissy. She does some really funky modern stuff that I love and would really lend itself well to textiles or wrapping paper. I'll have to see if she'll let me put a picture of one of her works up on here so you can see what I mean. Anyway I mentioned a collaboration the other day and she seemed really keen! So, with our powers combined - her artistic talent and my sketchy knowledge of creating repeating patterns in Illustrator, I'm hoping we can come up with something cool and get it printed on Spoonflower. How awesome would that be?

1 comment:

  1. I feel the exact same way about Amy Butler and I've never been able to buy any of her designs.

    ReplyDelete

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