Introducing Woven Watercolors
ART BLANKETS! I'm so excited to finally launch these beautiful woven blankets into the world. They've been a passion project I've been working on for about 2 years in between wedding client work and commissions. It's been a slow process as textiles are completely new to me but something I've been wanting to experiment with for years.
As much as I love watercolors, I've been craving to produce something tangible and useful, something that could be functional for the home while staying true to my watercolor style. This was easier said than done. My watercolors are bright and colorful, something I love to paint but not necessarily to live with in my home, which my husband and I prefer to keep more minimal and muted in design and color. I didn't want to produce something I wouldn't want to live with. It was also important to me that these were made well, in America, and would feel heavy, like a quality, cozy blanket. Multiple rounds of sample testing with various vendors proved unsuccessful- the colors were too bright and the quality was cheap and thin. I back-burnered the project for awhile as I got busy with wedding season work (and my own wedding!) but I was eventually connected to a weaving mill in North Carolina who works with some of my favorite artists and textile designers to produce their work and sure enough the first sample blanket I received was spot on.
Frida is the only design in this series that was not an original design for the blankets. She's one of my best-selling prints and one of the first illustrations I created while living in NYC to be sold in my online shop before I ever started Clementine. She was a model for jewelry brand Frieda & Nellie; she was a prominent face on One Kings Lane's sister site Hunter's Alley, allowing me to start my side-hustle and leave my full-time job to eventually start Clementine Studio; and she was even the face of a popular Mexican restaurant on 6th avenue who stole her image without credit thus teaching me my very first copyright lesson in LLC business! Frida has been through it all with me so she was a no-brainer for my first blanket design.
This was a great image to sample test as well because the illustration is indeed very bright and colorful, but the woven version of it is more muted, while still staying true to the original colors which I'm still blown away by. The way the threading depicts the watercolor shading is what makes these so unique: the lighter shades incorporate more white in between each color thread- so it appears light green, but if you look up close at the thread- it's actually 3 or 4 different thread colors woven in a specific order to create that color from afar.
During the process of producing these, we moved to a new apartment and I desperately needed art for a large feature wall in the living room. For whatever reason, I knew it had to be a giant tiger. I painted a sketch of it planning to do a large scale watercolor painting to be framed and hung on the wall, until a lightbulb moment when I knew that instead it had to be woven into a blanket and that I would feature it as a hanging textile on the wall.
HE'S PURE MAGIC!
For my third design I knew I wanted something that could be a little more neutral than the other two. I wanted it to be moodier and calming. I took an informal poll on Instagram Stories for help with the third design and mountains were a clear winner. Which worked out great because my husband and I went to school in Colorado so the Rockies are special to us and something we would definitely want a visual reminder of in our own home. Not to mention most of the poll-takers on Instagram happened to be my college friends (thanks guys!) who are also obviously partial to mountains. Win-win!
I was also lucky to have very talented friends, power couple Raissa and Elliott, to model and take some amazing promo shots this Summer on a trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and I'm so happy to have these photos to commemorate the initial launch:
So that's the story behind the 3 blankets. I intend to create more designs that have an equal significance and can't wait to see these babies in people's homes- either as a couch companion or as a featured art piece on the wall!
Thank you so much for your support, I hope you love them as much as I do.
