Blog - Cotton & Flax

Behind the Scenes

Holiday Shipping Announcement

I want to let all you awesome readers know about USPS holiday shipping deadlines, because some of them are coming up! Readers outside the US probably know how long packages from the states can take to arrive, but it might come as a surprise that the USPS shipping deadlines for international packages is less than two weeks away!

No matter where you live, I am happy to work with you to get your Cotton & Flax items delivered before Christmas / Hanukkah / Kwanzaa / Winter Solstice / Your loved one’s December birthday (can’t forget those Sagittarians!)

New Tea Towels in the Shop

Photographed a couple of the new tea towels yesterday. I know I shouldn’t complain about lack of sunlight (living in Southern California and all), but it has been much trickier getting good light for my new product photos now that it’s getting towards winter. These photos will do for now, although I bet my perfectionist side will make me drag the camera out again on the next bright day.

These linen/cotton blend tea towels are great for tidying up the kitchen, or using as a placemat for an afternoon treat if a friend drops by unexpectedly. I still really love this diamond pattern, remember when I shared the drawing behind this pattern?

You can also download an iPhone wallpaper in this pattern for free. Fun!

New additions to the Cotton & Flax collection

I’ve been dying to share all the new work I’ve created for the Cotton & Flax collection this month. It has been weeks of planning and printing and sewing, and the final products are slowly coming to fruition. I hope you’ll find these new additions as exciting as I do, but today I will share just one of the many new items to come.

Perhaps my favorite addition to the shop are these new wool felt coasters! This material is absolutely lovely: rich colors, very thick, and they’ll protect your furniture from those annoying water rings. I’ve hand-printed the felt with my patterns, and they’ll offer a nice artistic touch you can enjoy every day.

Looking forward to sharing more soon. For now, check out all the other patterns of coasters in my shop (there are tons more to come!)

Playing Catch-up

I’ve been back from Austin for a few days now, and I am a little behind on adding items to my shop, as well as posting here on the blog. My last post was actually written over a week ago (even though it auto-posted yesterday), so I hope to post a lot more about the new work I’ve created for Cotton & Flax, as well as a little recap of Feliz and my adventures in Austin. I also have a new iPhone background I hope to share tomorrow, so stay tuned.

Letting things go

It’s been an exciting few weeks around here, getting everything for the fall/winter collection finalized. But there have been moments of frustration, too, as I struggled to curate my sketchbook full of new patterns down to just a few new design to add to the mix.

I’ve talked a little bit before about how paralyzing it can be to have too many choices. Well, it was the same story all over again as I tried to curate my collection down to the patterns I loved most. After spending the summer developing so many new patterns, it was really tough to narrow it down to my top four. Mostly I just felt disappointed that some of my favorite patterns would not be used, at least not for this collection. It occurred to me that I could share a few of them here, so they wouldn’t go to waste!

I don’t think of these patterns so much as rejects, but as patterns I may return to later. Now that I’ve seen all the new work in it’s final stages, I’m not quite so bummed out about these unused patterns. It’s inevitable that I won’t be able to execute some projects, so I need to practice letting things go. To all you creative readers out there: do you ever feel disappointed about creative projects that don’t come to fruition?

A busy week of making.

It was strange to take most of the week off from blogging, but I just had to focus all my waking energy on finishing my work for Feliz Holiday Sale in Austin this weekend. I’ve been printing, sewing, and packaging items like a madwoman this week, and I hope to share more photos of the finished products soon. Until then, here are a few Instagram snaps of my works in progress from this week.

These are all the different versions of the printed felt coasters I’ll be adding to the shop next week. So bright and fun!

This was one of the last pieces of fabric I printed before hunkering down into sewing mode. I will be debuting new printed tea towels next week, too!