Last week, I had the lovely pleasure of meeting Alice Rebecca Potter, a delightful textile designer/illustrator/crafter-girl. I fell in love with a few of her delicious designs and wanted you to meet her, too!
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Be sure to check out Alice’s Shop when you’re done reading the interview! She’s giving all Qe readers a really cool discount!
Special Offer for Qe readers:
Free Shipping if you message seller before purchase and leave this code: QUID:SDP09
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Important details:
In the Seat: Alice Rebecca Potter
Shop Name: Sleep Dream Play
Shop Website: www.sleepdreamplay.etsy.com
Location: London, England
QUiD: Tell us a bit about what you create.
Alice Rebecca: As a Textile Designer my main attention when I am creating is always the use of patterns, and the illustrative and narrative element to my work, as well as the variety of surfaces things can be applied to. I really enjoy making various paper products, including notebooks and greetings cards. My journey into card making started when I realised I had a mountain of scrap fabric that I had printed during college, and just needed to use it up in some way. I also seem to have a slight obsession with the alphabet and enjoy seeing the numerous ways that element materialises in my work.
Q: Do you do it full time or part time?
AR: At the moment this is a part time venture, working on things in between my other part time job as a bookseller. I do plan to become a full time seller one day, and for my business to become a reliable source of income fro me.
Q: What are the essentials for your craft?
AR: The basic essential fro me are the obvious; pens, pencils, paper etc. I also have a bag of wooden blocks that I had cut at the local wood yard, and which I dip into every now and then to create vintage style blocks. I also cannot live without my sewing machine, or my computer, as I use Photoshop a lot, to put my work into repeats and things like that.
Q: Who/ What inspires you?
AR: I would like to say I have one special person that inspires me, but I think I can thank London life, my peers and friends in their own creative disciplines for my inspiration and most probably my motivation. I would also say old personal family photographs have been a real source of inspiration for me, and the next collection I plan to work on may be coming from an old relative’s science book from 1924. It’s an extraordinary educational textbook.
Q: Tell us one interesting fact about yourself.
AR: If I had been born a boy, my mother’s first choice of name for me was going to be Harry (see surname for reason of interestingness).
Q: Where do you create?
AR: Right now I currently work in my bedroom, where I have a very large desk that takes up almost one wall space. Its covered in mess, as I just can’t seem to keep any resemblance of calm in my personal space. I would love to rent a studio space in the future of course.
Q: Where would you like to see your business go in the future?
AR: I hope to fully expand my range and really focus on producing collections that follow fashion collections. For example a Spring/and Summer capsule collection and an Autumn/ Winter capsule Collection. A focus on colour will be important if this is a line i choose to follow. Also offering my prints on large pieces of fabric would be nice, so people could use my designs in their own work. I want to see sales increase weekly in the short term and in the long term I would like my label to be a trusted name in design.
I also look forward to being featured in a new design book that comes out in April, called Digital Textile Design, by Melanie Bowles.
Well, we look forward to seeing her designs in that book as well! Thanks Alice!
