The Most Beautiful Knives I Have Ever Seen

       One of the nerdy design sites I subscribe to had these up yesterday! Wow, these are nested cutting knives for the kitchen. As cooking is a spare time love, I have to say I fell in love and felt the need to share my nerdy side with all you today. Sadly...they're on sale for $700 on Amazon so my kitchen will be bare of such love for a while. Designed by Mia Schmallenbach and of course Made in France! Thank you! This is art and design done right. Have a great day everyone!

Acorn to Oak Handmade September SparkCon and Coursera

         This coming month we have two great events planned for the team on really opposite ends of the spectrum.

September 13th-16th: SparkCon: A number of team members will be at setting up shop at BazaarSpark in downtown Raleigh and showing for the 4 day event which is the largest arts and crafts event all year featuring local creativity and talent in the area. Whoot! So excited! Please come out and enjoy the wealth of beauty. This is the last week to register to be a sidewalk artist if you are interested in making something fun and new we would love to have you. Food, bands, exhibits, acrobats! It's a wealth of beauty. This is one of my favorite local shows. Especially, LLLavender by Lauren Smith for the Fashion Show. She's an awesome designer/group member. I really love her knitwear collections being more of a woven gal myself I like peeking into her mind. Please come have some fun! There's so much to do and try.

September 24th-November 5th: Operations Management on Coursera by Christian Terwiesch: This summer everyone in the team worked on learning various elements of the business or polishing them to brighter shine if they had prior experience. While some people are at the point that they are ready and off to the races or fall shows, other people need more help on the meta skills of managing their business. Since Coursera has started offering many of the top business university courses online for free (not sure how long this will last so please go ahead and sign-up). This will not make you a better artist, craftsman, or designer, but it will help you streamline and cut down on the time you have to spend doing the boring parts of your business. Nash is looking to get his MBA because we struggle with the not art part of the business all the time. Because we all want to spend more time making meaningful connections and works, and less time on paperwork. Hope to see everyone online or in person this month. If anyone is interested in doing a coffee study group for this class let me know. :-)

Have a great day! Looks like an exciting fall.

Textile Friday: Oxford, North Carolina Lace Factories

         Many people don't know, but up until the 1970s, North Carolina was a major lace producing area of the country. I find lace machines fascinating because they were some of the earliest textile machines invented that fueled the industrial revolution. Unfortunately, many of these beautiful machines were gutted by the medical industry in the 1990s in their failed attempts to try and produce living tissue and blood vessels from these beautiful pieces of art.
         Thankfully if you ever head to the sleepy town of Oxford, NC you can see two awesome survivors of this gut: Heritage Lace and Macra Lace. There's also the amazing abandoned Scranton Lace factory in Asheville, NC that closed in 2002 which supposedly is full of looms and equipment still. The Tribune did a wonderful video of it in January which I have enjoyed watching many times. I love lace. With the upcoming wedding, I find myself drawn to leather and lace more and more this season. Spools of lace have started popping up all over the studio. I am afraid Nash is being an incredibly good sport about the whole thing as I have started designing my own wedding corset and undergarments which dear reader you are thankfully saved from most of the Bridezilla effect by hardest self-control(I'm trying my very hardest not to gush too much.). Please forgive me if September the blog is full of chocolate cake tastings, piles of blue silk, and wedding invitations. Speaking of, does anyone know when invites are actually supposed to go out? I've been putting off and putting off hand labeling all those suckers, but the task is dancing on the horizon.
            Oh well, back to lace. The first lace factory is Heritage Lace which you can find locally at Southern Seasons in Chapel Hill. This is a family owned and operated business based on traditional European fine lace from Dutch Lace Farmers which includes an in-house design team so you can request custom lace designs on the fly. Free shipping, a newsletter you can sign-up for, and great end of the season sales. My favorite is a current lace dynasty shawl on sale for a mere $13.00. Yes, I am looking for a reason to buy it. One of the things that often surprises people is that Made In the US direct from factories is often the same price or less as Made in China. Department stores and retailers today with the exception of Amazon tend to take a lion's share of the profits around 80% from the total leaving 20% for the actual goods in question. Why not save the money and get yourself something worth keeping as a heirloom? Factory direct from your iPhone is a great way to shop these days.

             The other store up the street is Macralace which you can buy believe it or not off eBay. There's almost 3,000 items in the shop which I find overwhelming, but if you enter a specific search for lace it rapidly narrows down the selection to beauties like this. The two companies have comparable price points. These two companies are also a good example of the two strategies being employed by textiles companies in the race for the online marketplace. Setting up a killer website or using a popular service. I still haven't decided which is better. I love both of them and it's wonderful that we have such lovely textile supply companies within driving distance. The only thing I ever have to go out of state for is silk and I'm looking to drop that from my design menu next year if possible. Everything else made not just in the US, but made in our fair North Carolina. May your days be sunny and filled with beauty. And if you are also a lace hound like me, go check these guys out.

Hopefully see everyone at the Etsy Craft Party tonight at 7 pm.

TTT: Working with Artists and Designers

         "Designers often have an idea but cannot translate it to paper or even put it into exact words. My job is to be skilled and experienced enough to understand their final goal and to be able to make it come to life."
                                                                                                             -Delores Kelly

          Sometimes you have weird conversations that make you realize you've grown up more than you thought the past few years. This weekend was one of those. Sometimes I feel I still have so far to go as I look at older successful designers and what they have manged to accomplish with decades of work behind them. I feel like a baby sometimes in the face of their experience. Things Take Time as my grandmother liked to say. Many fashion designers work 10 or 20 years before finally getting to international acclaim, most are in their 50s and beyond. Well, we all see our own human faults. As some of you know, I started this company hand-knitting scarves after storming out from my sales job to "start my own company to rival Ralph Lauren. Damn you arrogant bastards." I mean if he and his wife started with ties...I could certainly do scarves. Man, pride goes before a fall. Several months washed up later, I conceded defeat (you just can't live on that kind of money, hand-knitting nets people roughly $1 hr., you have to be really dedicated) and started facing the music of what really makes a profit. Art is lovely, but art should also be something other people want to buy at a fair price. Three years later I'm still facing and learning.
           As some of you know, most of the people in the building consider me a commercial designer or production artist. Me, I like think of myself as still building my lifestyle brand company by growing. I've done production line, patternmaking, cutting, alterations, repairs, sweeping floors, and emptying trash cans. Ideas are all well and good, but having a book full of sketches and no idea how to sew them teaches you the nasty gut kick of humility really fast. Since my goal is to create a brand that allows normal women like us to look our best, I don't mind getting my hands dirty with various aspects of the trade. Anyways, Nash (who sees all my faults and still loves me...so lucky on that one) pointed out that in the past year manufacturing has in some ways made it harder for me to speak with artists and designers as they often express the spirit of what they want and not the technical details. His point is taken as I've yet to have an artist hand me a techsheet. As having staff and working in an environment where I have to communicate my ideas it is both humbling to realize how much I assume the other person knows (which they may not) and how much information they need me to provide to actually produce their dream. So no more assumptions people. Have a great day!

Surprise Packages In the Mail

This week, a long overdue package arrived in the mail for Nash. He's started doing some of the cutting for Sparkcon in a few weeks! He's awesome like that! In one of those crazy blow-backs to the past, I found him a pair of Vintage THOR electric scissors on eBay. Yeah, now he can channel his Viking tendencies in fabric. Hope you are also having fun getting ready for the show in a few weeks!

No More Artist Partnerships/Short-runs

Textile Friday: Project Runway Is Back!

                      Project Runway is back again for an stunning Season 10. It's a guilty pleasure to watch this show. I can't imagine the luxury most of these designers get to express their own voice which tells me at least that my commercial/brand work is overwhelming the process a little these days. Looking forward to Sparkcon a lot lately as it's a chance to open up and let the public see some of my private work.
                      My clear favorite this season is Dmitry Sholokhov. He calls himself a draper, but his stuff is lovely and very controlled for most drapers I know. He's a couple years older than me at 33 so his sewing is just drool worthy. I hope I will have half of his draping talent one day as I tend to lean towards flat patterning first and only approach draping second with eyes closed and a pained expression. Several of the judges have already commented on his sample making abilities. You can see their minds going, "How do I get him to be mine?" However, after the toss away last season with Anya over Viktor, I will reserve my opinions on this show. We'll see who actually wins vs. who is the most capable. Fashion, like life, is not always given to the most talented or able. I wish that had been covered in school that high test scores to not equal success in the real world. Still, I am hopeful. I just love seeing New York's garment district. Many of my sources, I have to drive around the State for, the idea of being able to walk into a store like Mood and just buy fabric like the selection they have is mind-blowing. Most factories around here specialize...you go to one place for one thing and another for something else. Even Mary Jo's in Gastonia, NC doesn't touch the garment district. Ah well, a girl's gotta dream. Well, I'm sitting back and watching this with happy popcorn on my one day-off a week.
                     Go...Dmitry...go.