In collaboration with Satsuma Press and Heath Ceramics, there’s a wonderful giveaway on the Satsuma Press blog, where you can win ceramics from Heath, kitchen linens from me, and letterpress cards from Satsuma Press, designed by Skinny laMinx. It runs to 7 December, so go enter now!.
The Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg has just opened a show called FENOMEN IKEA, “dealing with the complex field of mass production and quality, globality and national tastes, individual habits and quality of life, fashions in living and advertising, and asks questions such as: does IKEA offer good design? Where does IKEA get its ideas from? Is IKEA typically Swedish? Can living quarters be organized? Does living in a good environment mean that you live a good life? Is there such a thing as a collective IKEA experience?”
Part of the exhibition is a section called NON IKEA, dealing with designers and artists who have made objects that “take up the concepts, materials and products of IKEA and create something completely new out of them: taking aesthetic principles to extremes, introducing new functions, alienating the designs to make them subversive and provocative.”
I’m thrilled that my I Wish We had IKEA tea towels and cushions are on the NON IKEA part of the show. Wish I could be there.
I’m so excited to be working on a collaboration with Lynn Russell of Satsuma Press, a small letterpress studio in Portland Oregon. My card designs, printed on her press, will be available for Christmas orders.
Local fashion designer, Alexandra Höjer commissioned me to design this fabric for her Winter collection along a folklorish theme.
I’m thrilled to be stocking new shops all over the world, like Enid in Frederiksburg, Texas, Lotus Bleu in San Francisco, Swedish online store, Designista too.
I’m so thrilled to have been included in amazing new book called Naive - Modernism and Folklore in Contemporary Graphic Design, published by Gestalten Books. It’s fantastic to have had three of my illustrations included in such a lovely book, but even better that this book is really fantastic and well put together.
For a month or so I’ve been working on a new paper cut, and it’s finally finished. It’s called Flower Net.
Spruce is a design studio in Austin, Texas, doing wonderful upholstery projects. They gave me a big thrill when, not long after releasing my Sevilla Rock collection, they asked for samples, and not long after that, they placed the first yardage big order I received.
It’s so exciting now to see what they did with the Duikers yardage that they ordered.
I’ve added a new tea towel design to my Etsy shop, and it’s called Waiting. Initially, Waiting was a silkscreen in red ink on paper, sold in a limited edition of 25, and now it’s available as a tea towel, in red and in charcoal.
I’ve finally found one solution to all the scraps, misprints and seconds in my studio: it’s the scrapEep! Stuffed with cotton offcuts, this little Eep! birdie works as a pincushion or as an eco-friendly baby toy too.
Possibly the pinnacle of a tea towel designer’s aspirations: My Borrowed Spoons tea towel, in the New York Times, nestled up with tea towels by Lucienne Day and Marimekko. What a thrill! See the article here
I’ve been upholstering a number of chairs in my Sevilla Rock range and am thrilled with the results.
I’ve just reprinted I Wish we had IKEA, this time in burnt orange. It’s available for sale in my Etsy shop.
I’ve done a really fun papercut project lately. It’s an album cover for US singer-songwriter David Fletcher. The album’s not released yet, but here’s more or less how the cover artwork will look.
I’m very excited to show my first complete fabric collection. It’s called Sevilla Rock, and each of the five designs is based on ancient paintings from the cave walls at Sevilla in the Cederberg mountains. These drawings were carefully recorded by my friend and rock art enthusiast Peter Slingsby, who has very kindly allowed me to use them in these designs (thanks, Pete!).
I’m very excited to soon be showing my very first fabric collection printed on running metres! I will be showing more pics here soon.
Many thanks to all the kind people from the UK who got in touch to let me know they’d spotted my Orla tea towel in their Guardian newspaper this weekend. Dee Beale even sent me photos (thanks Dee!), so there it is, on the Guardian Weekend Wishlist. Niiiice!
Dwell magazine is one of my favourite magazines ever, so I’m particularly thrilled that they chose my I Wish we had IKEA tea towel as their product of the day today!
I have a brand new tea towel design, called I Wish we had IKEA. We don’t have IKEA stores in South Africa (poor us!), so all that great design at good prices is frustratingly inaccessible. Last year, someone kindly sent a 2009 IKEA catalogue for me to drool over, and I’ve made some sketches of the things I liked best.
I thought it would be fun to share my IKEA wishlist on a tea towel, and I’ve called it “I Wish we had IKEA”. This design is printed in grey water-based ink on natural-toned cotton hopsack.
