In the Bag: Shapes & Colors Textiles

The Company: Shapes & Colors Textiles

The Founders: Samantha Cisneros

The Story: When Samantha Cisneros graduated college, she started looking for the perfect job. And when she didn’t find it, she decided that, hell, she’d just create it herself, bringing together mid-century design, folk art, and sustainable fibers. When she got going in 2009, the Bay Area designer was making oversize calendars and posters, and now she’s added pillows, wallpaper, aprons, totes—you name it. Her next big move: fabric by-the-yard.

One of Samatha’s creations will be in our Housewarming Grab Bag, heading your way tomorrow!

Of a Kind

Let’s pour something summery into these Up in the Air Somewhere cups and drink up, shall we? —erica

Katie Kime Shows Us How She Made Her Awesome Lucite Tray

It’s clear that it’s amazing.

Some mood-board action!

Katie Kime knew she wanted to keep the production for her label in the U.S. She didn’t think to start the search in Austin, where the way-cute housewares designer is based, but through a guy who knew a guy, she struck gold—or at least lucite—in her own backyard. Here she shows us exactly how it all comes together for her Of a Kind edition. —olivia seely

“Step one of the manufacturing process begins with the cutting of the six lucite sheets required for each tray. These are cut using heavy machinery. As you can see in this picture, a worker runs each piece across the blade for the right measurement.”

“Step two is matching the edges of all six pieces of lucite precisely with the others and preparing for adhesion.”

“Step three is the most tedious part because if the glue runs even slightly at any of the seams, then the tray can’t be used. We found that using a syringe for the glue is the best way to ensure that the glue won’t spread. At each seam of the tray, we apply a thin line of glue before combining the pieces of lucite.”

“Step four is the drying. This takes 24 hours, and once that time has passed, we inspect them and get them back to my studio to finish assembly with the tray inserts.”

“The tray inserts are custom patterns I design based on inspiration from anywhere and everywhere—a vintage wallpaper from eBay, a fabric swatch, or, most often, patterns I see while traveling, like a Moroccan rug or a ceramic from Thailand. From a sketch or a rough rendering, a vector file is created of the pattern. From there, in Photoshop I paint with various color variations until I find the right combination.”

“That finalized file is then sent to printers and cutters and placed inside the tray…et voila!” 

Get this guy first thing tomorrow! Click here to make sure it doesn’t pass you by.

Katie Kime

Katie Kime always knew she was going to be an artist—she was making clay pots at seven and drawing Van Gogh cutting off his ear at nine. Plus, creativity runs in the family: Her mom’s a painter, and her dad’s a woodworker. Even still, it wasn’t until college that being a creator really struck her as a viable career option. In 2006, at the end of her senior year at Duke University, Katie put together a trunk show of the random things she’d made over the years—frames constructed from old library books, custom-printed paper, refurbished antique furniture. The response was, in a word, overwhelming.

After moving to Austin and producing an accessories collection in Rwanda through the Africa New Life organization, she dove head first into developing her namesake label of furniture and home goods that draw from her color-happy North Carolina upbringing. “Growing up in the South, my dad wore seersucker suits and bowties, like, not as a joke,” Katie says.

But fused with a certain south-of-the-Mason-Dixon preppiness are influences from her many travels—everywhere from Kenya to Fiji to Bolivia. That said: Everything she produces is made right here in the U.S.A. —olivia seely

blog.katiekime.com

Of a Kind

Our girls at Upstate are delving into HOME. Yup, one more reason you won’t wanna get out of bed. —erica

Kelly Wearstler

How did Kelly Wearstler develop her killer aesthetic sensibility? By auction- and flea-hopping all through the eighties. “In one row, I would see things that were turn-of-the-century, French and Italian pieces, and in the next row, there’d be something completely modern,” Kelly explains. “Educating my eye and seeing these different objects play against each other made me fall in love with art.”

Her next move? Art school, naturally. The South Carolina native packed her bags and headed for Boston where she waited tables by day and spent her nights studying graphic design and architecture at the Massachusetts College of Art. After graduation, she signed up for an apprenticeship with world-renowned graphic designer Milton Glaser (That “I ♥ NY” logo? Yep, that’s him) to put her already-sophisticated design skills to work. By 1998, she was well on her to becoming an interior-designer powerhouse, starting with the Avalon Hotel Beverly Hills and moving onto the Viceroy Hotels and Bergdorf Goodman’s BG Restaurant—oh, and her own home line, which oozes her signature raw-meets-refined style.

But Kelly found no need to stop at décor. With a loooong list of happy clients already under her very stylish belt, she decided to bring her skills to, well, belts—and jewelry, jackets, dresses, and bags, taking her namesake label into the apparel-and-accessories realm in 2011. “You just have to be focused,” she explains of her envy-inducing empire. “I’m confident, I know what I want, and I know what I don’t like. There’s no, ‘Let me think about it.’ It’s just, ‘Yes. I like it, let’s move on.’” —monica derevjanik

kellywearstler.com

Delve into Fort Standard’s Mind-Blowing Array of Products

These two aren’t jewelry designers—they’re everything designers.

Though they recently did a deep dive into jewelry, the super-talented duo behind Fort Standard—Greg Buntain worked as a carpenter and Ian Collings as a welder before launching their own business—have pretty much done any kind of design you could think of, from toys to furniture to lighting. Here, just a handful of their awesome creations. —raquel laneri

Now’s your chance to score one of their latest creations: a so-cool brass cage bracelet.

Balancing Blocks
Greg: “This is probably the first thing we made together. We were renting a temporary shop space, but we had no money—just basic tools and a bunch of scrap wood. There was this holiday pop-up shop opening up in the neighborhood…”
Ian: “And we thought, ‘Great! An opportunity to make rent!’”
Greg: “So we just started messing around, and we ended up with these balancing blocks. Then things got crazy. Within six months we couldn’t keep up with the orders anymore. We went from 0 to 70 retailers in less than a year. We were cutting blocks non-stop. There wasn’t even enough scrap wood in New York to keep up with demand; we started going to Philly.”
Ian: “So when Areaware approached us and asked if they could take over production, we were like, ‘Please!’”

Elevate Side Table
Greg: “The design of this table came from the idea of ‘elevating’ a beautiful piece of stone in a simple and elegant manner, allowing it to be the focus of the design. We like the idea of letting materials and their inherent qualities help guide our designs.”


Counterweight Dining Light
Greg: “Roll & Hill approached us about doing a line of lights. We designed four lights for them, and they’re going to launch in April in Milan. The counterweight on the dining light is actually on a pulley system, so you can raise and lower the light in relation to your dining table. If you raise the stone, the light gets lower. It’s actually pretty fun to play with.”

Sprue Candelabras
Ian: “We make these candelabras the same way we make our bracelets. [Ed: Like the one they created for Of a Kind.] We did this for an art installation, so we were free to be really creative and make these really heavy things. It really inspired us and made us want to do more with bronze casting—and made us launch our line of bottle openers and jewelry. “

Cage Necklace
Greg: “This is one of our favorites! It’s bold and unapologetic. Our initial idea was to create brass cage-like beads that we could then put on different cords, but this piece was a bit of a departure. We were experimenting a bit with more sculptural ideas.”

Fort Standard

When BFFs Greg Buntain (left) and Ian Collings launched their design studio Fort Standard two years ago, women’s jewelry was about the furthest thing from their minds. Then again, the two furniture-makers who met studying industrial design at Pratt hadn’t anticipated carving Bauhaus-like building blocks or assembling minimalist lighting fixtures, either.  “We had one goal: to do our own thing,” says Greg. “We didn’t really have a direction or a business plan. We just started designing all these different things, and they’ve all kind of worked out.”

So, how did they make their way to industrial bronze bangles and metal-and-rope necklaces? “They sort of grew out of these candelabras we make,” says Greg. “We use this lost wax process—we mold the design out of wax, and it’s cast in bronze. But we loved working with wax so much that we decided to scale it down, and we ended up with these little cages that you wear around your wrist or on a piece of rope around your neck.”

And, to the duo’s surprise, people are really responding. “At the end of the day, we’re two guys who haven’t done much jewelry design,” says Ian. “And sometimes we wonder, ‘Is it something that women are going to want to buy? Is it going to be feminine enough?’” But they try not to overthink things. The ultimate goal for these pieces, as Grey explains: “Let’s just make them look cool!” —raquel laneri

fortstandard.com

Of a Kind

Fort Standard, one of those NYC companies that can seemingly produce cool shit of any ilk, from bottle openers to dining tables, is taking on jewelry. And this is the sort of awesomeness they have in store. —erica