Design Inspiration from Heather Ross + A Giveaway!

I love to hear what makes other designers tick: what gets them inspired, gets them creating. That's why I am so excited that Heather Ross is making a stop here on her blog tour to talk about her design process (and of course, to give away some fabric!). Here's Heather:

I am most inspired by the things that I loved as a child. I have made small efforts to “grow it up”, to develop a more sophisticated look on par with the fabulous florals and wall-paper style prints that other fabric designers manage to make, but everything I do looks as though it came straight from the imagination of a nine year old girl, and trying to make it look otherwise just feels like swimming upstream. Just in the past few weeks I have come to realize that this is a good thing, and that maybe I should turn myself around and swim with the current for a while.

A few years ago I was visiting my sister. She lives with her husband and three children in one of those rare California neighborhoods where everyone has little porches and kids can come flying through their screen doors and run into the street without worrying about traffic, scooters, skateboards, and bikes have the right of way. Her son Henry was, at the time, about four years old. One morning, while his sisters were in school and I was working at the kitchen table, he and his mom created an elaborate highway system in chalk that wound from the bottom of their stoop down onto the sidewalk. I walked outside to see what they were up to and found myself looking down on it from above, impressed and confused by the perfect curves and even thin form of the streets, drawn carefully in white and yellow chalk. “We traced the hose.” said my sister. Said hose was in her hands, wound and ready to be hung up. This is something I love about my sister and the way she raises her children: imagination is always more important than putting away the hose. The art that they had made on the sidewalk (along with my nephews extensive tiny car collection, which was harder to gain approved access to than the Walt Disney Film Archives) inspired my rabbits and Race-cars line for Kokka of japan.

I love things that remind you of... well, LOVE. Things that make you laugh, things that make you remember. The tinier and more insignificant, the better. The more easily forgotten, the more surprising the re-discovery. My best customers have always been people who love to be reminded of the things they loved when they were four, or nine, or even eleven. Or, obviously, people who actually ARE four, nine, or eleven. While I loved every minute of creating a grown-ups world in Weekend Sewing, I am now looking forward to a few lengthy projects that will hopefully be loved and enjoyed by kids.

Lately I have been spending a lot of time in the kids book sections of new and used bookstores. I am so inspired by so many of the illustrators I stumble across. here are a few of my favorites:
Marc Boutavant
Miroslav Sasek
Mary Blair
Feodor Rojankovsky

And a few more who I am haunted by:

Carson Ellis
Tom Gauld
Poly Bernatene
Astrid Lingren and her Tomten
 

Thanks so much Heather for spending some time with us and sharing some of your inspirations!

But wait! There's one more thing: you can win a bundle of Heather Ross fabrics! All you have to do is leave a comment below telling me and Heather what inspires you to create and I will chose one person randomly. Comments close on Saturday April 5th at 12 pm EST.