The Boat House recently arrived and I haven’t been this excited for a new collection in a long time. The Boat House is a combination of all of my favorite colors and the ever so popular nautical themed designs. I’m obsessed, to say the least. With that being said, I’m sure you could imagine my excitement when I had the opportunity to interview the amazing designer behind this gorgeous collection. Sweetwater is a family run design company and they combine there creative minds to make beautiful collections. Take a look at our interview to find out their background story and their inspiration behind their creations.
Q: What got you interested in becoming a designer?
A: It seems like we have always been designing. My mom started a business called Farmyard Creations back in the 80’s. Through Farmyard Creations, she designed many sewing patterns both quilts and soft sculpture items. She began designing fabric for Cloth works a short time later. It is then that my sister and I got the idea to take her fabric designs and turn them into scrapbook paper. We changed the name of our company to Sweetwater and we focused primarily on scrapbook products. After a few years, my mom missed being in the quilting industry and decided to attend a Quilt Festival in Houston. That is where we met Moda and began designing fabric for them and designing quilt patterns of our own once again.
Q: How many collections have you designed?
A: We started designing fabric for Moda in 2008 and Boat House is our 14th line. We have 3 more new lines after Boat House that will be coming out in 2015.
Q: What would you consider your style to be with the fabrics you have created?
A: We always try to have a clean and simple feel when designing fabric. We tend to stay away from busy prints and focus on keeping it fresh.
Q: Is there an overarching theme with your different collections?
A: I would say text prints. We love text and always try to incorporate text into our lines of fabric. Each line of fabric has a text print that seems to be the focus print of the line.
Q: How do you find inspiration for your next collection?
A: We always come up with a theme for our next fabric line. Sometimes the theme comes easy, sometimes it is challenging. The theme can come to us while shopping, looking online, or even oddly enough taking a shower in the evening.
Q: What was your inspiration for Boat House?
A: Sweetwater loves red, white, and blue and one of my favorite holidays happens to be the 4th of July. We wanted to have a fabric collection that exemplified our love of those colors and our great nation but could also be used by our foreign customers. We think Boat House satisfied those needs and happens to be one of our most favorite collections.
Q: What is the most rewarding part of being a designer?
A: Actually seeing something that you designed on a store shelf. It is also fun and rewarding to see projects that our customers have made using our designs.
Want to know more about Sweetwater? Go HERE to learn more about them.
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