Natasha Makes with Kaffe Fassett 2021 Easter Zoom Call

i think we are good to go so um it this will go out easter monday so happy easter okay you know it's the first thing to say okay thank you so much um i have read your new book it's in the studio um and it is absolutely stunning two things i guess first of all is that you the very first thing that you say in it is um that you would invite everyone to your studio but you couldn't possibly when you wrote it we didn't live in this world yeah that's true and now you certainly can't invite everyone there so that's true perfect timing yeah there is a whole section on your everyday life but just quickly for the last year how has everyday life changed for you well you know it's very strange because it's it's it's like i am like a hermit you know who lives you know in this old tower in the middle of the country um it's you know away from everybody because i'm always working on my projects and then i break off and fly all over the world and give workshops talks with thousands of people and then they come home and i'm a hermit again so it it's not changing i mean the hermit part is goes on i've got all my toys here i play with my fabulous colors and make things and um i have a wonderful time what i miss terribly what's really different is going to the coffee shop at the end of the day with my crossword puzzle you know new from the newspaper and sit down and do the crossword puzzle and drink my chai and so i can't do that anymore so do you not get the newspaper no newspaper no chai oh no i got the newspaper and i do the puzzle but i have to do it in my back in my own space and does someone else make you the chai uh no i go and well sometimes i can go and buy it to take away you know so you still get that walk because what struck me i mean i've i've read a lot of your books now and it did strike me this morning that actually since having children i rarely get the chance to read a book um but i always make an exception for yours because i'm captivated all through and always exercise plays a massive part whether it's um being a whirling dervish whether it's training as a dancer uh whether it's your pilates lessons two times a week whether it's open-air swimming like a madman at silly o'clock in the morning um in one hamster it it's always it's always there so what have you managed to keep going for the last year uh the pilates classes uh which are so important because i what i find i'm very bad at motivating myself to do push-ups or stomach crunches or any of those things or you know i mean i used to go to the gym and and that was my excuse i would sit you know work on the rowing machine or something you know to get the body moving yeah and i just i find i'm very unmotivated to do that myself but i have a wonderful pilates teacher and she just puts me through my paces you know uh some of the stuff i can't do at this great age anymore but i just you know i do as much as i can and it feels wonderful so keeping moving because yeah the you're you're still designing fabrics knitwear all sorts of different things and when you knit it's fair to say you have a low afghanistani chair yes well i use it used to be an afghanistan chair that kind of wore out not that but i have a low chair and is that is that really important then the level that you sit at to knit i don't know i don't know i you know it's funny i i wonder why i think it's because i put my yarn on the floor and then i'm closer to it not quite on the floor so you don't get stuck on the floor but exactly yeah and but before that it used to be that you just you sat on your bed and you knitted on your bed and that's right yeah that's right across like cross-legged on my bed i mean it's quite a student-type existence isn't it to just i mean i i just used to do everything on my bed when i was a student at everything you know my homework painting everything all used to happen there yeah and um that changed yeah about 1990 right yeah so should we go through your hazard because you are now um you you have your studio it is your home um but it took you a while to build up to the whole the whole studio when you first came to london in the 60s uh you lived in notting hill and you had a little flat there but the house that you're in now you actually found as a flat for a friend that's right yeah um it's funny because i was quite happy in notting hill um but but you know this friend of mine desperately needed a place she was a very creative woman she had uh what an autistic son autistic at that point but she uh she needed a place uh to create and to make a life here in england she was america from new york and so you know i just went out you know the way you do for a friend and just found a place you know uh and and and and and it was very inexpensive i think you had to pay about 400 pounds key money to get this flat and we had it was just one flat and um she moved in and she had it and then she got married and she said i'm going to give up the flat do you want it and i definitely and so i grabbed it and then i was able to buy the rest of the house as as i was able to afford it i mean that didn't happen overnight did it and when you first moved in there were certain carpets and chairs that went i believe cottages yes swirls of vomit carpets you know it was it was these i have those 1950s smells like on it yeah just horrendous and and and there was no i was like conventional furniture they had two car seats you know from like a sports car i mean they were actually quite nice they were red leather um but they were you know big metal kind of chairs that sat there covered with leather um and anyway i sold those and i sold the carpet and they might have been a great height for knitting i'm just throwing it out there if you missed a trick yeah that's true but then your furnishings because it is it must be one of the things that people always always ask you know you you are renowned for your color you are renowned for uh your your needle point for furnishings your quilts uh for your net for all of these things that make our houses homes so i guess one of the first questions that people ask is well what is your home like and um and it used to have a lot of sawdust on the floor okay because i didn't i didn't have central heating you know the idea of having central heating in those days was just an asthma because i didn't have the money for those kind of you know uh fancy fancy things so anyway i um these new toilets as i would walk up the street there was always somebody throwing out an old chair or something and i would bring it home stack it up in my hallway and then i had a little table and a saw and i would saw these things up and and put it in the fire to burn for my heat i mean this is this is the dream right it it it it's it's so wonderfully rustic and um and so not what anyone would probably expect from someone living in central london um just so funny and then if you had guests who got a little bit chilly that's right yes you really have done your homework uh yeah they would say to me oh i'm so cold aren't you calling i say you know what we need let's get some more wood for the fire you just go and saw some wood and by the time they'd end up sawing the wood they were warm which is what i discovered you know a little little activity makes us you know our blood starts flowing and we get warm absolutely i mean you are not afraid of the cold as a man who for 10 years swam every morning open air now that was with um i mean well an amazing woman who um who you did a lot of tv with that's right ann james yeah i mean she did this wonderful series with me uh called glorious color which we which we put out on channel four and uh you know she was marvelous uh working with her because she just had this kind of a very studious way of of studying what my life was like and making all these notes and things and then making these beautiful films beautiful they were they had a lovely slow development and a lovely atmosphere i mean she made me look amazing um you know one on painting and one on needle points and one on knitting and so forth and and and they were just beautiful um but but what was interesting is one day she called me up and she said i think it's time you went swimming and i am going to take you and this was in the middle of summer and so we started and then um it got you know further and further into the year and it was getting colder and colder and i said to a russian guy that used to swim there i said i'm afraid to go into the winter you know i couldn't i couldn't swim in the cold and he said you've gone this far you can go you can you can swim in the winter come with me and so you know every day you know we would we would go and and finally it got iced over and they would break the ice with an ore and we would jump into this little bit you know hearing the clinking ice cubes you know around us and you know you just jumped in and out quickly uh but it just made you so fresh and your blood was flowing and i never had a cold for like 15 years working you know doing that cold water swimming i never had a cold hey maybe that's the key right now maybe you need to go dip your toe again and uh yeah because i hear there's something it's all the rage now everyone's talking about cold water swimming you know people would say they were just free freaked out that i did it and they would say all the people in the park would say it's very dangerous you you people shouldn't be there and i would look at these people you know who were like 108 and still swimming and they were fabulous you know and i thought you know they're motivated and they're still alive come on it must be something good here absolutely absolutely are you not tempted to go back to it i am very tempted to go back to we've just we just bought some tickets to you have to do it times now and have to go at a certain time slot but i'm going to go back yeah amazing amazing oh that's fabulous news so your book um it's it's a lovely step by step through um through your home which you eventually got to buy as the complete three and a half floors that's right but the ability to first buy it well they tried to evict you first didn't they because you had filing cabinet that's right is that an invictable offense because i've got filing cabinets i mean you know that's like just tidying up isn't it yeah they said he he must be running a business because he's got filing cabinets the fact that i had 50 000 you know cones of yarn all over the place no yeah no problem they couldn't see that i'm excited so what did the judge say well they they're they miswrote their proposal when they said you know we're evicting mr fassett because blah blah and they put the wrong english so the sentence wasn't proper english and the the judge said i can't accept this because it's not proper english and they and they said oh please your honor can't you make an exception and he said my dear man this is a court of law you paid mr fass's expenses and go home get out of here and i'm fabulous i mean i walked out i had my flat and i had it for the rest of time because they couldn't now evict me and i could have passed it on to my children if i had any it's almost worth having some just to pass it i know exactly just just thinking about it and that was lovely and so then i bought i was able to buy the building you know i got it together and bought the whole building which is great so when you from the outside it it looks like every other home on the street and then you walk up the path and you get to the porch and the porch is the very first hint that there's something magical inside one side is an amazing uh mosaic of hollyhocks and then the other so my question is because the other my overwhelming memory of the other one is is that there there is actually a teacup with the finger yes yeah for the handle and how many how many people do you find when they're waiting for you to answer the door just you know with their finger step through the postman postman you know men would you make this this is amazing and they would have you know their finger in the in the handle of the teacup as i would open the door you know that you know that was fascinating because you know a guy could see that you know that was like tile laying but it was big chunky pieces and brandon did that side of it was gonna be my next question did you have a side each yeah that's right and his was abstract big strong diamonds in in in shades of color it's just absolutely wonderful very much like a patchwork and then my side was hollyhocks which my ode to the english you know that's one of the most wonderful english garden plants i've ever come across because it's so operatic and theatrical and huge and these great towers of flowers absolutely wonderful so that is that is the first hint and the next thing is you know you ring the doorbell um and there's a stained glass there's stained glass in in the front in the front door but it's not normal uh it starts off in a nice ordered check yeah yeah and tumbles down it's phenomenal i love it and again this is this is something that you and brandon designed together yeah yeah and i had a friend who was who is it who was he was a fabulous irish singer but he also made stained glass you see i want you to to do the top just the way it was this kind of victorian stained glass window but then i wanted to disintegrate and tumble down as if it's just falling to pieces and falling down and he did it absolutely beautifully yeah it is it's really stunning and there are so many treats for the eye um just in those first 30 seconds of arriving at the door um you know you could stay there half an hour and just drink it all in it's it's just wonderful and then the door is opened and you step in and there's the most incredible wallpaper and the eye is led down your hallway to the end and when i came there was your chair at the end now was this a commission piece because it's covered in vegetables needlepoint vegetables and took three of you three months to to make yeah yeah it was three sometimes four um according to who was in the studio at that time but uh yeah it was it was commissioned by steve lovely the great photographer my first four books um but then he decided to move back to america and he didn't really want the chair so that was fine we had this fabulous chair which we've put into many museum shows uh around the world and it has been the star of the show so it's a great showpiece it's just it's just phenomenal and the wallpaper was given to you by your friend yeah yeah um i had this wonderful friend karen beach who worked in uh a wallpaper factory and she was you know designing and making these fabulous wallpapers and they came in panels and this was a wonderful old sanderson's design of a kind of oriental garden and it was just marvelous so that was that was lovely to she donated that to us for a credit in the book amazing absolutely incredible and that's not the only place is it that you've got some of karen's wallpaper designs sanders and designs now your dining room yeah so as you go around you don't go down a flight of stairs it's on that level isn't it i'm just trying to think yeah same level um so it's kind of at the front of the house as you as you would go around the wallpaper in there could just have been one color that's right but three different colorways yes like a sort of black and white version and then there was like a sepia version and then there was a colorful version you know autumn colors and it was kew gardens so it's fabulous trees and gardens and chinese pagodas and so forth and so all of that i was able to um we we got this guy very carefully with a pair of little nail scissors cut out all the trees of one colorway and superimpose it on the next colorway so we did layers of these of these things instead of having you know usually you would just have a freeze of trees and then you would have beige sky going forever not scaring the horses well i wanted to scare the horses i wanted a tapestry on the wall you know so we had layers and layers of these wallpapers coming down it was marvelous but the colors aren't they're rich but they're not vivid yeah so it is very the the overall effect is incredibly sophisticated and and actually restful it's because you feel like you're outside yeah yeah i feel that too yeah i'm good that's that's exactly the feeling i wanted and then when i found went to an auction and found this amazing carpet which we put on the floor and then i found a wonderful tapestry that we put on the table so it was like the walls were coming onto the table so we had this wonderful old medieval tapestry that was machine made isn't it it's all that feeling of leaves and nature and then when i was there you also had quite a lot of christmas decorations in there as you do and i mean not little discreet ones cave it would be fair to say would you would you like to explain where they came from well what happened is i i was given this fabulous commission to do uh a 25-foot tree decoration in the victorian albert museum in the foy age of the museum and so that was very exciting and we decided well if we're going to do the tree which i was going to cover with fans of my fabric which we we put on to card and then folded like fans so they were just beautiful and they were these wonderful stripes like the stripes behind me yeah and so that was wonderful to have all these striped fabrics on these fans and then we decided to explain explode the whole idea around the fourier of the whole uh atrium of the entrance to the vna and so we made these huge bowers of a silk flowers and fruit and things like that you know to be you know festival you know one of the things i i find about christmas i'm gonna i'm often asked to do christmas trees or christmas decorations and i always go for high color you know i can't see the point in doing something in beige and silver and black in which people do for christmas and it is stunning and in your in your dining room so um i know when when um you know hosting is is a thing that would be you know a candlelit a candlelit dinner in there would would be the thing is it only for high days and holidays oh yes otherwise it's a storeroom you know it's on the ground floor so you know you get a huge shipment from coach let's say you know bags some things they all go into the dining room or you know an exhibition comes back from a museum all these quilts and knitting and everything else always gets stuffed into the dining room and so it's a big job to clear it out if we're actually going to have a dinner party a cozy kitchen supper is generally the way right i can't remember what a dinner party is anymore a concept huh i know i know we were saying that yesterday like the the idea of actually going out to eat somewhere is woof so when everything lands and it gets shoved in there door shut uh let's not think about that for a while but at some point that does have to come out and it does have to be dissipated throughout the home who gets that job well there's bundle and there's brands and i work very hard i'm sitting upstairs creating the next knit collection or working on my you know writing the next book or whatever so basically if they're scurrying around trying to make order and trying to keep the archive alive you know boy it's a lot of work it is a lot of work and you do keep fabric you do keep at an amount of fabric from every fabric that you create and that is all archived that's right do you ever have a rummage and uh and are you ever surprised and go oh no i forgot i did that oh oh that's quite nice yeah oh darling i'll tell you the surprise brandon said let's clean out the we have one little storeroom an actual storeroom that was meant to be um and he said let's clear out there's buckets and buckets of buckets of old uh swatches of knitting yarns uh you know where i would try out different colors or try out a new pattern and i'd have these little swatches that i would make and he said you know just see what you can get rid of in these well i started going through them and i said oh they're fabulous i didn't remember doing this big coat on this big shawl and this little waistcoat and anyway i i've pulled out all these things and i realized they would make incredible tapestries and i could sew them together to make patchworks of knitting samples and so i did and that for about i don't know three months four months five months of this incredible prisoner lockdown year i was able to make these huge tapestries i've never had so much fun and i think they're more beautiful than my fabric patchworks i really really love them because it's all of that research of trying a different pattern in different scales different color schemes and then how all this geometry and imagery comes together um as a patchwork so what i notice about every different art form that you have is and because you write about the process in your book brilliantly and but it always comes back to and then i hang it on the wall in the studio did you know just a little fun fact did you know that you have sold more of your um your studio wall fabric than any other of your fabrics did you know yes my best-selling fabric is a gray grid no it was not lost on me um and i did have a little giggle to myself um but it is it's a great concept and it is something that i've seen you use hugely yeah what does hanging these things on on your fleece wall allow you to do well what it does you know when i first started designing um i i wanted to get like a a little distance on things and see if a whole co you know you can take four or five fabrics and put them together and and you kind of know that they're gonna work but to put 25 colors together 25 different fabrics and have them work you have to put some distance on that to see the whole picture of the whole quilt and so what i would do is fold up fabrics in little squares and then stand on a on a bed you know put them on the floor and stand on the bed looking down to try to get assistance and it was very unsatisfactory when when those quilts were sewn together invariably there were two or three elements that had to come out so you'd have to take the whole grill apart take those fabrics out and sew in different ones and so i thought there must be a better way and then in those days there was like a little white work wall that people would have very very stark white and you would you would put some a few pieces on it and they were always very small i thought we need something big covers a whole wall and it has to be a neutral color so that every color you put on to it kind of looks all right and doesn't look shockingly contrasting with this horrible snow white and so um i jumped this up it took five years to convince my government and my government my my company to do it they wouldn't they they said people are going to be interested in a piece of gl gray flannel and i said yes because the fabric you cut out a patchwork piece of fabric and it sticks to this and you can arrange a whole quilt on a wall and stand back and get distance on it i said it would be very oh we don't believe that this would really be a golden so finally after five years they decide okay we'll go with it we'll do it we'll put a grid we'll do it in this neutral color they put it out it was a massive seller for them and the next year they dropped it because they said okay that that's out of style now what do you mean honestly it's a notion i said it's a tool exactly and so they brought it back and as you say it's the biggest seller of all our fabrics because when we do a workshop 30 people will buy a work wall in order to have the best possible tool to show their work off yeah i mean we we sell it by the meter so that people can decide how big they want it to be i mean that makes the most sense to me and it is i i absolutely agree with you completely getting that distance getting that perspective is fantastic and you do it with everything and and that and i said i'm skipping ahead really but each year you um you commit to doing two different fabric collections yeah um but also two knitwear collections as well the peruvian um yeah yeah peruvian connection yes that's it i was thinking collection that's right connection um which is utterly stunning so each year you have a you have a certain commitment so there's two fabric ranges two knitwear ranges obviously um you know your interviews with me yeah in the delivery yeah without the schedule yeah uh and then your uh your meeting with philip jacobs where he brings you um your your fabrics as well what we'll talk about that as well what else is in that diary that is fixed oh and you're weak on a health farm with your sister that's right that's right which has to be cancelled last night first time in 11 years that's not fair i know i know and it's cancelled this year too we've got it set for next year okay and what is so important about that that week oh god well i break off totally from this studio and i go to california and then we go down to mexico to this wonderful hail farm it's got wonderful mountains around it uh so it's in this little valley and so every morning you get up at like 5 30 or 6 o'clock in the morning and you go out hiking on a trail and take this like five mile hike up the mountain and often there'll be mist coming up the valley and it's just beautiful and it's you know very rough and marvelous and then you come back down and you have an organic breakfast everything is grown on the farm so it'll be beetroots and corn and tortillas and you know wonderful wonderful mexican food but all done organic vegetarian and it is so gorgeous and so good for you and anyway after that then we go to yoga classes and pilates classes and swimming in the pool and just writing in our diaries and reading our books we we were both avid readers my sister and i um she started going and she's the one that got me into it and she and i have the most in common in our family you know there's five of us kids in the family but she and i have the real connection and we um we just believe in good food and exercise and keeping ourselves fit you know and so we're working i mean it's working it's a perfect place for us it's heaven and then in the evening you you know you will meet other other people at dinner and and are they do they tend to be diverse or are they like-minded i mean how oh totally you know you meet somebody oh here's a sort of ordinary couple there is no such thing everybody we have met there has a story that is just unbelievable i mean there was one woman i met who was an incredible businesswoman and she was just she was very tickity-boo and she everything you know she dressed wonderfully and everything but she her business was creating um houses for uh people with low incomes low income housing yeah yeah yeah and doing it beautifully and she said you know what you don't need to make a massive profit i make enough profit to keep the business ticking over and i'm able to help all these people well that is wonderful i mean to me that's the most brilliant thing because it's it's what we don't have enough of in the world it seems like whenever you know you give the project of housing to people it gets more and more and more expensive and high tech and everything else you know and and and out of bounds for people who need it yeah yeah and so i just love it that this woman just was dedicated to that and you know so those kind of things i mean just wonderful people and then after the dinner you go to a lecture given by a wonderful doctor or or a philosopher who comes down and and just does it for having a free time he'll you can bring whatever guests you want to and so they can enjoy all the facilities of the place and then you get this wonderful mind of some brilliant you know author or something who comes and gives us a talk on something uplifting so mind body and spirit all catered for in one place absolutely absolutely it's interesting you say about this lady in the and the housing because it it struck me this this is your philosophy with things as well you are such a giver of knowledge of your sharer of your love of of fabric and when you um when you did the vna um exhibition yeah there was a little bit of backlash because it had also been commercial you had sold your books and you'd sold your patents um and and it you know almost like well that's not a very british thing to do but actually what you did was enable people to instead of buy a 2 000 pound one-off uh knitted jumper yeah they could they could create it themselves that's right here's the recipe here's here's my secrets here's how i did it um and and here's the materials that i used you know go off and make your own you know don't complain about my prices you know because one of the things that i found about pricing if if you price things too though people don't appreciate it so what you're doing is you're not making much money you're not able to afford materials for the next project you're just limping along and people don't appreciate you but if you put the price high enough then people are very impressed but you it's about you know you know your worth isn't it know your worth and i don't think that's a very british thing necessarily that we're very good at yeah unless you know it's all no i couldn't possibly i couldn't possibly actually yeah you can you really can and i think that your can-do attitude has got you um into more places doing more exciting things and i kind of have the feeling and correct me if i'm wrong that even if an opportunity was offered to you and you didn't know how to do it you would find out how to do it so you could do it yeah i mean i am i am curious in that way you know if i can buy i mean there's a lot of things i can't do and you know or that i just don't have the patience that just don't have the character to you know like for instance take a car apart and put this together you know it's like you know a lot of people would say to me you know you should learn how to drive i i don't even know how to drive properly i don't have a license and i don't drive um but i know people who do well that's if i need a ride i find a way of doing it but yeah but one of the things about uh you know that thing of i think it was a very fortuitous thing that i came to england because i love so much of what is represented here and the strength of the english and the aesthetic and the humor the wonderful humor but what so so i like that but i am quite i am you know in the eyes of many british people i'm a very pushy strong person if i say we're going to do this thing we're going to do it and if and i'm not shy about saying i have the talent to do this project i know there's a lot of things i can't do but boy there are certain things i know i can do and i can do it with style and with panache and i'm going to do it and i'm not going to be afraid to say that so i think that that combination of that kind of ambition but learning from the english about being a little bit more laid back and more less ambitious and and and less greedy and grasping i mean i don't need a lot i've learned what i need and it's quite a low threshold you know i get enough to buy my materials for the next projects and i'm happy and enough food on the table and my you know i was able to buy this house at quite a knockdown price and so those things are important you get all all those ducks in a row yeah and then you can create and you can you not to worry it's getting those base comforts isn't it you know once those are sorted and you know you know you've got the roof over your head the food on the table materials you need and off you go whereas you know there was a period where i was in total anxiety all the time you know was i going to be able to get to the next month uh you know out of paying my rent and so forth so you know you just and also you know the whole idea about an artist supporting himself in my day that was quite unusual i mean you know people said you know you got to be a doctor or a lawyer or you know a dentist or something you've got to do something where you know you're doing a professional thing where you're going to be deaf or run a restaurant you know which is what my father did um but and so the idea that you could actually support yourself from something creative and playful and therapeutic was unheard of well there's a couple of things then i'd like to touch on by that because firstly when you were painting and that was solely your bread and butter um and the stress of that because like you say if you didn't sell that painting a month that was kind of what you aim for a painting a month and that would then that would then pay your rent and put food on the table okay yeah but actually that kind of wasn't where your heart was i think you thought it was yeah but there was an anxiety about being in the studio and painting yes yes because because when i you know my art school course was a four-year course and i lasted six months and then i ran away you know so i was always feeling inadequate that i was going to get caught out that i hadn't put in the education and the work you know and so so i was always nervous about painting i you know when i look back now i realize i can draw and i can paint uh fine just relax and enjoy it and and the more you do it the better you get at it but i'm giggling because if it's taken you until your 80s to realize that you know you're okay at painting yes you know something i can do right exactly yeah at least you realize it at some point yeah well the thing is you see as i was growing up um i was i as as a representational painter i was a stodgy old-fashioned person you know what are you doing still painting teacups you know for god's sakes you know because i i was up against um not only andy warhol who at least was doing faces and things yeah but the same one just in different colors yeah yeah yeah lots of copies but but but also you know um de kooning and franz klein i mean these were big abstract expressionists you know and and you know the drippy man with the pollock you know throwing buckets of paint at the you know that's what what art was going into and if you weren't doing that you know who were you you know what you weren't edgy enough and so i was always very self-conscious about painting a room or a person or or a table full of beautiful china and i love those things i loved painting a still life with a beautiful paisley cloth and lovely english china with roses on it and things you know i wanted all that beauty but you see i was able when i discovered textiles i was able to bring those images into my textiles and recreate the romance of those fabrics that i was able to find in portobello flea market i was able to bring those back to life by creating those kind of patterns that i loved when i would come across them and you and you do that so beautifully so for those that don't know you move from painting into knitting yeah and and as a you know what i use six four six foot four yeah yeah lovely lovely i i can wear heels around you it's very lovely um and a man who big californian guy who knits yeah um but there was an anxiety that was removed from from the studio work to well hang on i'm just going to knit and it's quite lovely and look wow yeah yeah i mean what i realized was that on days when i was working on a painting and i should go to my studio because i i had a studio up the street for a while um i would do any i start cleaning the house well you know from k facet to be cleaning a house is something desperately wrong you know what is going on because i was avoiding going to the studio i have a quote here about your uh where is it um being a casual sort about tidiness is how you have described yourself okay i'm extremely tolerant about my own mess but you know i mean one of the things is as somebody once said in my life you know i'll bet you know where everything is i mean it's chaos and it's definitely stacks of stuff and everything else but i kind of know where things are and when people tidy up for me i can't find anything so that's just one problem but the thing is what i found is that when when i got into textiles i every morning i was bouncing out of bed to get going on that next you know knitted shawl or some great coat i was making or some big needle point tapestry that i was creating i couldn't wait to get going on it and to keep working on it and there was never a point where i got sick of it or it got tedious which painting often did get tedious for me i didn't want to finish up my paintings you know yeah i i i i feel that and you first discovered um your love of yarn with bill gibb on a trip to a mill in scotland and the beautiful tones that a man out the back was mixing and creating um and and there you are going well hang on why are people knitting beige when there are these colors yeah um and and so obviously the whole row and yarn thing happened for you and working with mizoni and all of these all of these incredible things and having a front cover of your knitwear on vogue and all of these this incredible journey that you've had with knitwear and and now what is it that draws you to the peruvian um yarn that you now work with it's very simple okay knitters and i can knit something with 27 colors in it and give it to them full of pattern and complexity they don't bat an eyelid they sit down and they knit it the way i designed it and that's unusual because what i found i couldn't find knitters in this country i would have i would have had a huge industry of making fabulous knitwear uh and and getting it reproduced if i could have found the knitters but they all just threw up their hands when they were oh my goodness 18 colors a row i couldn't possibly do that and i was working with like 25 colors a row on a shawl or something yeah and no problem but but it threw people for a loop but you did find one but then but yeah i found one this wonderful woman who wasn't very very hunt arrived at your door my hunt for a great knitter was answered yeah she she came to my studio and she said i want to learn about what you're doing there's something about the way you're working that i would like to find out how you run things can i come and just you know witness how you're operating and i said fine and i she said i'll knit something for you and i said fine i said here's a sweater i'd like it reproduced now here's my collection of yarn which was these huge drawers full of colors and she sat down for a whole afternoon and matched colors because it was just little bits of yarn left over and things have shed to really really work to find enough colors and she went home and she knitted this thing and she said when she came back she said to me before i showed you i have to tell you i couldn't find all the colors that you used in your piece and i said well if i can't tell then you you're okay anyway so she brought out two sweaters and laid them down i couldn't tell which one was mine wow they were they were so fabulously knit i mean she did a brilliant job of reproducing what i had done and i said i can't see where you've changed things so you're fine you're hired and she and i worked together for years uh and she was fabulous because she was also very neat precise knitter she could do wonderful patterns and she would figure out how i would say i want something with wonderful ragged mutton sleeves and i want little peplum jacket blah blah blah she worked it out she worked it all out so you had you had the color vision and she worked to then create it into that pattern that other people could generally technically put that together and also she knitted so fast that it was viewable i mean uh you know she and i were just like demons would get on the vehicles and sometimes when people were filming us they they they couldn't even see what we were doing because we were working so fast we had to slow everything down to show people how on film but yours is um yours is a knit one pearl one i mean it it's yeah that's right i kept the technique the all-over technique very very simple just stocking stitch yeah but um putting in loss of color and power and you know doing fair isle and intarsia and you know wonderful use of color and and of course finding these fabulous yarns here that people were ignoring while they knitted their beige sweaters yeah now why why is it do you think because this is the thing isn't it in fashion uh that it was very beige what why and in our homes you know beige and what what is it about beige why do why are we so scared of color do you have a chicken it's safe and it doesn't scare the horses and people are so terrified of making a mistake uh that they don't allow themselves to swim in that great wonderful pool of a life enhancement you know color is life enhancing i can remember times when i was so depressed and so kind of tired and beating my head against a wall you know trying to get knitting going when i've tried to get knitting going in the early days and people would you know all these companies were turning me down they wouldn't let me design for them because i was too exotic and i remember one company saying to me what you have to understand mr fassett is the english do not want to be distinctive you know like don't create something beautiful for them and make it unusual you know how dare you yeah so that's what i was up against and i would get tired and then i would see a new lot of colors or i'd find a beautiful knitting wool somewhere and i my lip my spirits would lift and i knew that it had a power and so i i just fought against the naysayers well you and steve lovey uh your photographer at that time you both did to uh your your coffee book and this is the thing you turned a knitting book from a um hey knit this is quite nice to a coffee book to something uh that could be there was a work of art there's no two ways about it well what happened was it was very interesting because i saw a you know a fabulous art i was always looking for inspiration uh in in in art books and i found this incredible book big volume called the dyer's art and it was to do with e-cat fabrics and things and every page was like a full page of beauty you would open this thing and you would see this wonderful big flower that was created in ecat silk you know in magenta and apple green or something so beautiful and so when i decided i wanted to do a book i wanted it to look like the dyer's art what's interesting is i know my my um company that i'm doing a very spec that book that we've just come out that we're talking about k that's in the studio was done by abrams and abrams was who did the dyers are and so that was very interesting to come back to that company just fantastic um now the team that you work with let's talk about the team that you work with because it's special it's so special and um for me i don't know how much your your upbringing has an impact on that you were brought up in big sur your family created and forged this um amazing restaurant and i quote you on this the food really wasn't that important i mean it's only a restaurant people don't really go there to eat right but it was the people there and you were surrounded by um the most incredible artists and actors and dance groups and everyone that was at the height of their joy yes yeah well here here was you know we were in the heart of the country you know a little tiny country community living on the coast of california very rough and rugged country the population was 300 spread over 72 miles so 300 people you know all you know individuals who are living in their castles up in the mountains you know their their big log cabins or whatever you know so it's a very very individual place very tough to to exist and everything else but a stunning landscape and my parents had the amazing tenacity and and you know just give the courage to hire this amazing architect and build this absolute state-of-the-art um modern building a restaurant of you know from a frank lloyd wright student so it was just a brilliant piece of architecture wonderful big concrete terraces painted pink you know sort of dyed pink and then these beautiful big you know redwood structures and lots of glass and windows looking out into the trees and so on it was just stunning so so it became a kind of a place a pilgrimage place and a lot of people would hear about it you know artists and creative people from all over the world and they made their beat a path to our door and so we were constantly entertaining these extraordinary minds and people who totally understood what we were doing and amazed that we had the courage to do it in america at that time do you think that gave you more of an education than school oh my goodness yes totally because you saw you saw people who would come and they would talk about how they started a little theater group and beer it's you know uh and or or or a ballet company or you know sometimes we would invite like i remember you know going to a a balinese dance troupe and inviting them all to come down to depend uh you know to the restaurant and and you know or we would have a harpsichord uh concert on the terrace or some great ballet dancer would come and do amazing dance through the whole restaurant you know it would stop everything everybody would stop eating and stare at this amazing floor show so it was it was impromptu and but you saw people realizing their creative lives you know people saying i have an idea i have something i love to do in my life and i'm gonna i'm going to tell the whole world about it and i'm going to make a life out of this thing so of course that was hugely uh you know encouraging and educational for a young mind like mine so you saw that and you've emulated that you've done all of those things yourself and you have you have changed um how we knit how we quilt you you've changed that there's no two ways about it your designs have changed all of that for which you know many of us thank you hugely for that you know you've been an amazing inspiration to so many um but the person that inspired you to come to england was a man that you met there he was a um and and was that your first hint that actually england might be somewhere you'd quite like yeah yeah yeah i i mean that's christopher isherwood who was i think he was 60 years old at that point i thought he was ancient because i was like i don't know 25 or 26 or something um and and here was this this old man i mean this crisp mind and these intelligent eyes and we just started talking about something and one thing led to another to another to another and i remember like the whole dinner party just evaporated and he and i just ended up talking through this dinner party about everything and life and color and imagination and love and people and everything and so the next morning i woke up and i thought who is that man i mean he was extraordinary and they say he's an author i've got to go and get a book of his and i went out and i found about four of his books in a book shop i bought them all came home and i just sat down and i read through everything of his and he's you know he was the greatest writer in the english language at that point you know he was one of the greats and so it was just amazing to have that connection and then it was he was english and a lot of his books were about england or his english view of america which was incredibly interesting and then so i thought well i've got to go to england i think if if christopher came out of that um period with that incredible mind and that wonderful humor he was so funny and so you know i i went back to got to england and it was just as funny and rich and wonderful as i imagined it to be but more so more so because i i realized that i uh three months vacation which is what i planned when i came to england wasn't going to do it wasn't going to cut it yeah stay longer and absorb this amazing place and you have you've stayed here pretty much ever since so if we're talking humor then one of the best people in your life with humor has got to be brandon and you know i adore that man and he lights up a room um and his fabric i always know which ones are his uh the k facet collective is made up for anybody that doesn't know is of course yourself brandon mabley and of course philip jacobs so brandon's is always the quirky one yeah yeah well brandon i just met on the street here you know he was in my neighborhood and i i just got chatting to him and i he had a very bizarre way of looking at the world you know and i just i like i like you know his mind so anyway he said to me where do you live and i said well i'm over you know a few streets over and i said if you just look up into the windows you'll see some buddhas and some bits of color i said you'll know that that's my place and so he came and of course he didn't just look through the window he knocked on the door and said i need to see this place and he came up and he looked around and he just got it you know it's like he's he has very little formal education and no education in art at all but he looked around and he saw exactly what i was doing with different things he would say this is good but it's not quite finished is it how do you know that yes you're right um and and so forth so he he just had a wonderful view of what i was doing so he had two jobs at that time but he would come on his days off and just sit in the studio and absorb what was going on and i put a pen in his hand i said start to draw and draw this i would make him draw great big complicated things and he would in his primitive way he would draw and then he learned to knit and he learned to do needlepoint and he started designing knitwear and designing natopoint and he just had this flare this wonderful sense of fashion and everything that you know after a while i just said okay you've got to have a job here i've got to start paying you and so he came and took over and ran the studio for years i mean still runs the studio and um you know we just became the best of friends and he as you say has that most hilarious sense of humor it's totally off the wall i will be hysterical at some film i'm watching on television and he will sit there with a complete slit mouth it doesn't get to him but there are certain things that make him absolutely crack up and he makes everybody else crack up all the time he's very very funny he is he's he's a he's a wonderful human that's the best way he's just a wonderful human and um it's interesting that he came with the education side the education system without bidding about the bush had failed him um you know dyslexia at that time was not something that was heavily recognized certainly wasn't help that wasn't a help there um and i think it's very easy and was very easy at that time to come away feeling like a failure um and but he had found an artistic outlet in in his cooking yeah um and and brandon is an amazing amazing chef and he i think and he also has the most amazing nose so which i think goes hand in hand with with the cooking i mean he even said to me when he when he came to my studio he was like oh uh you know i can smell such and such because i i had some perfume on and then he said what would smell really great on you is such and such and sure enough i i didn't you know we were not i didn't try i i just bought a bottle and it's it's my favorite it's my favorite that he has this innate talent of of being able to shop for people you know having find the right products he is incredibly and it's totally instinctive with him but he i think that's the joy oh my god because he he hasn't had an art teacher or you know a lecturer that you look up to because you know you've worked really hard to get into such and such an institute to study um then drum out that beautiful basic instinctive knowledge that he has yeah yeah and that for me he and i've said this numerous times for me brandon draws from the heart the things that give him joy and the things that amuse him yeah yeah yeah and that's what i see it is it is i mean and that's the thing is i'm i'm a person who doesn't have much education i'm completely kind of self-taught and very instinctive and so i met my match with brandon i mean you know he he's totally totally that way and um also totally gets me and gets my point of of what i'm doing and and you know sometimes he doesn't have the courage to do the things i mean i he'll say oh i think we should be cautious here i don't think this is this is going to sell or this is going to work and i'll say no we're going to do it you know i'll push through but he follows up and he makes everything work as as well as it possibly can and also he's more humane than i am i mean i'm very much concentrated on my creative work and kind of uh sometimes kind of forget about the people in my life uh to an extent and and brandon is brilliant at being very sensitive to people's needs and and people's histories i mean you know we'll travel the world and we'll go to a shop that we've been to once before he will remember that the child had a medical problem and the husband was an alcoholic and you know he remembers all these things how are you and how are you coping with your problems i mean all of that just passes me by because i'm i'm like the absent-minded professor you know i'm constantly just looking at the color of their clothes or for the yarns in their shop or the fabrics or whatever so the pair of you do make an incredible combination and then to throw in on top of that the artwork from philip jacobs yeah who brings to the collective the most incredible he told me off okay for calling him a botanical artist i'm not a botanical artist it's happening and he's like he's brilliant but he is brilliant and he kind of is but because they're not botanically correct he's like no i am a fabric designer um so no i and so i stand corrected completely but his florals are phenomenal i mean phenomenal and and you see he's more exacting and technical than i am so if i have an idea that i'd like to realize that i realize it's very very complicated and very detailed i'll kind of throw it to him i said you know what do something with wisteria you know i want every little petal painted and he'll do it beautifully beautiful and and he's also has a wonderful eye for seeing oriental designs or french you know historical designs or early english things and and you know going back into the history which which is what i feel like my real contribution to the world of textiles is giving people back the past you know going and finding the really good beautiful big strong flowers and things that people used to enjoy and bringing it back so that we can still have it and so phillip phillip brings those large bold um florals that were unavailable to you when you started patchworking and quilting but what philip won't do is the color work on there that's you and he has described you as the best colorist in the world right now quote well that's very nice but you know what what i loved when i first started working with phil he said now i'll do the artwork and i'll do it in these colors you know generic colors that i do everything in um but you'll do the colorways cave because i don't really like doing that and i went this is what i know how to do you know so i was very very thrilled and and you you know you really do so the the trio of you work incredibly together but you see i mean you say you know he has this japanese history philip's been collecting japanese artwork since he was 11 12. you know he has a vast collection um and such a huge love of that genre and that era but also he collects all of the antique fabrics as well with these large bowl prints um which when you were looking when you first started when lies are loose let's put the blade this is another one in the the people that cape has in his life that um that are fabulous yeah uh and liza lucy is one of them now she was a knitwear rep she just bought six copies of your book when um when when rowan rang her up and said do you want to you know do you want to be a knitwear not really we've got this guy k facet yep then when she bought the books at wholesale right yeah yeah that that morning she had bought six copies of my yeah so that was that was the stinger for her um and she is also the one that has coined the phrase you have a safe uh asset with k facet because otherwise you're calf all over the place that's right um yeah so she um she's i i love this woman for for for many things but the one thing i really love her for is that she kept sending you little bits of patchwork and see there's that that american pushiness you know that that she and i both have but you know she like i was saying oh i don't really have time to get into the whole new thing of patchwork you know so you thought that you were saying no and she was saying yeah maybe she was she was hearing maybe you know she would take all my my knitting patterns and create them in patchwork and and send me a block saying you know you knitted this once but look at what it is like as a patchwork and then i would start correcting and saying you know i don't like the white you used in that and so forth and so forth and then she'd say you're designing and so i gave in and i started making patchwork and boy what a fabulous world she got me into you know because it's we've never looked back and you have you are so correct when you say because a lot of your inspiration comes from past quilts antique quilts and that um that's where you needed to find these large these large prints that we just didn't have as well since we didn't have them they weren't out there um and these large-scale prints so for that we are incredibly grateful for you because you bring us all of these but they're they're amazing for bag making as well as as quilting they and dress making and everything else they they've just brought color and life and beauty into into what was otherwise a small print world so really really grateful for that um and so you you've worked with her for many years but also you know you you can't stitch and knit everything yourself so you started off um with a lady up in yorkshire because obviously going back and forth to the states wasn't always going to be terrible like you you can't you can't keep going over there so you ended up with a lady up in yorkshire um and she will tell us about it first of all well her name was pauline and she she had uh you know she would sometimes arrive in my studio and i would say i've got an idea and she would start throwing fabric around and cutting it up and showing me how to make this concept i had and um so i thought you know we should work together and we should you know work on our book together and so we started working and she was brilliant because she coordinated the whole book she uh she figured out where the patterns would go you know did all the patterns and then got a pattern checker to come in where but she and she would sell everything and she and i we would have these intense periods of just going up and making maybe 15 quilts at over five days or something in her studio it's just absolutely brilliant um and then um she would put the whole magazine together you know the quilting and patchwork magazines that we do every year but eventually she got um asthma and it's cutting the fabric the little fibers were just very dangerous for her so she had to stop and that was a big blow twist isn't it a real cruel twist of fate for her though very cruel twister but she's still in your life and you share a lot of books with her and oh yeah and puzzles she just sent me the most wonderful uh jigsaw puzzles to do these this wonderful painting that i just sat down in two days i did this puzzle i was so happy i love doing puzzles yes and and but when you do like when i do a puzzle i mean it's generally something with the kids um because they adore puzzles and and for me it's you know oh is this the face of a teddy bear does that go there is this the ear of a rabbit let's put that there but you take it to a whole new level and when you have um a jigsaw that is say based on a piece of art yeah this was what got me it's not that you are just making the jigsaw you take it a step further and you use it to find a greater knowledge and depth of that artist how those brush strokes went i'm telling you if i had an art school i would make every painter sit down and do a classical old painting or or a modern painting whatever uh uh as a jigsaw because you start to look at the brush work you know you're looking at every intense little detail and you're piecing it together and you see how you know a jaw was painted or an eye was painted or hair was painted you're and you're looking at every brush stroke it's it's the most extraordinary way of getting deeply into the artistic vision of an artist no it's for not i hadn't ever thought of it like that i mean i i spent quite a long time wanting to go into art restoration and it is about getting that detail and trying to replicate um don't know that was yeah i was i was really fascinated by that so if we go back to your home because this is this is what the book is is fundamentally about but those people that make your your home and and make everything around it oh hang on but we should say yes you're not working with pauline now but you do have now a lady in bristol who has kind of taken over the reins of that we need to give that credit there as well yeah and she's got a a group of of quilters uh these two brilliant quilters that work with her now um doing they do the entire book and it's fabulous because if i've left something out or i have a kind of half-baked idea uh uh janet will just run it up and then she will send me pictures of it and say do you really mean this and i'll say well not quite now that you've done that now that you put it together i can see that i need to change something and so it's you need those kind of creative people who spot where something is not going well or when it's going brilliantly and you have that in brandon as well i mean when you when you work in the studio sometimes he's working in the kitchen sometimes he's working alongside you um whilst you do the color work for philip you don't do the color work for brandon like he he does his own doesn't he that's right yeah yeah but it all it all marries up beautifully um i think i mean this is the book gives a great insight into into the the processes and i knew that that you had color palettes i think i hadn't quite got to the point that they were that they were not regimented but they were always there there's always a blue there's always a red there's always a pastel there's always that you know that yeah and it makes perfect sense and is that so because your prints don't go out of print there's the k facet collective classics that's right um and i think a lot of those are right from my doorstep very soon i've just had notification which i'm very excited for because not only have i now got your new collection but i've got the past stuff but because of those color palettes they all still work together yeah yeah it's beautiful yeah and it's very interesting um i'm constantly flabbergasted you know because i'm doing a book now where i'm going back and using a lot of past fabrics uh things that that are out of the running now as commercially but but i'm just going back into my archive and pulling things out and just making quilts with older things and it's just fantastic how how well they go together and you know still harmonized but that's i mean i always say you know i'm trying to make a box of paints for people and a box of possibilities so that you know with the delegate little pastel watercolor ladies they can do something very delicate very very quiet and very english or they can be very russian or chinese and you know hit it with the strong powerful saturated colors it's it's just fantastic so there is one room in your home that doesn't have a whole heap of color in and that's that's brandon's domain yeah uh and he's actually got some of your earlier works in there on the wall where uh where you went through a sort of white and white and tonal stage and it's a beautiful room where which opens out onto the garden and what struck me was you've got the the dining room which brings nature from the outside in um and then you've got brandon's peaceful restful um neutral area that then opens out onto this wonderful terrace and then back garden yeah but the terrace means that you take the indoors out yeah yeah because all the all the mosaic up the wall and across the floor uh is very colorful it's like it's like suddenly a patchwork quilt yeah so the world's collide it's it's it's really beautiful and you even have a succulent roof on your garden shed is that a is that a nod to big sur to life in big sir because certainly succulents suckling gardens are a big thing in california yeah and so you know i always loved them when i was growing up you know these kind of kind of prehistoric plants you know beautiful plant i love succulents and um so is brandon's domain is that an area that you venture in too much or when there's a nice summer day because that bat terrace catches the heat the sun it's like a sun trap and so we go and sit there particularly uh last spring you know when when we could bring out our deck chairs and sit in the sun wasn't that amazing the warmth of the sun which came to heal us you know when we were all feeling desperately frightened about being ill yeah and become you know whole and and and and healed and we were told to go outside and the weather for once uh allowed it which was which was really fabulous um bathrooms in in your home um have also had the uh facetmably makeover yeah it is fair to say and in in both in both bathrooms brandon's is uh again he takes this cream theme through but the mosaics are exquisite yeah now i have to ask i know that you source a lot of the porcelain and the pottery from car boots and places like that do you have it all mapped out and then is it a matter of quick the renders on shove them in quick or or how much leeway is there to find the perfect place for a perfect piece of pottery um i would say that it's it like everything else in my life it's very very instinctive and impromptu you know i would just get get a ton of china around me and my my colors you know wonderful little tile cutters and you and so what happens was that i would find you know like a colorful flower on on a plate that was white or or a teacup or something and i would cut away all the white so i had tons and tons of shards of white and so when it came time to build up brandon's bathroom in his very neutral domain we put a white all those white bits became say for his bathroom yeah no it's it's upstairs became richly colored like like kind of it's kind of like byzantine tiles or something they're just brilliant well your child's uh yeah they are they're rupert spyra um but they're his mistakes yeah that's right yeah i i found that this you know he was a friend of mine you know we did the dervish turning together and then he became a potter and i went down to visit his pottery and here behind his barn was this great pile of tiles that to me were gorgeous but to him they were all mistakes they were where the blazes had gone wrong you know you wanted pink glaze but suddenly green came into it which to me made it fabulous and so those were half price and i just came down with a huge box and just filled them with tiles and bought all these things at half price came back and and did this bathroom with all of these kind of slightly off tiles which to me are just stunning and and then i got him to make me a beautiful basin out of a fruit bowl you know a big punch bowl that he would make but in stripes of red and green and stunning beautiful glazed uh sink which i just love and the whole thing has come together very well and then you have you have artwork and they've got beautiful artwork by your niece in there as well that's another date in the diary isn't it a week that you spend painting with aaron that's right and and then last year you brought out was it yeah it was last year you brought out your book together painted because you you'd paint the same thing but but in your very different styles really beautiful really beautiful and you say that your bathroom is whilst the rest of the home goes through flux with exhibitions things for this thing for that your bathroom is your most thought through and put together room that's right so is that is that your your place of relaxation yes it is if if i i mean i i'm very careful because i have a very big bathtub so i'm i'm very careful with water these days i'm you know because you know water is a very precious resource so i don't want to squander it but occasionally i get myself a fabulous bubble bath and i come into that bathroom and i sit there and i look at the tiles and the colors of the wall and the paintings and and the plants there's a lot of plants and so it's a it's a sanctuary you know and it's it's it's made to heal you you know that there's color healing as well as everything else you know and then you have a nice oh relaxing warm bath it's just lovely it's your own spa when you can't get to that spot so yeah when you can't get to mexico that's the next best thing exactly um and then the studio okay so so this was my other question okay um artists obviously being afraid to make mistakes um could you talk me through the uh kermit green kitchen please and how did you live with it being green i know well i just got it in my head you know i love green i love green gardens and green hillsides and so forth so i'm going to paint my room my kitchen green well i picked kermit frog green and for those people who don't know what that is it's like um a granny smith apple but intensified deep and it was bilious i mean you would just go in there and use one [Music] it was just awful and so eventually i painted a nice soft yellow sort of primrose yellow is well while so many people in england go for magnolia and they can call it all sorts of different things they dress it up as um you know apple blossom white and other it's magnolia it's just magnolia is your magnolia yellow because it does feature in quite a lot of the rooms on the walls yes i mean this this room this room is painted with soft yellow too it's the same same sort of yellow it's it's not magnolia for sure it's it's it's more of a primrose yellow yeah i lovely little primrose flowers that come out in the spring yeah but in instead of having magnolia on every wall it's kind of like yellow that that primrose yellow is sort of yours yes and yeah my living room downstairs is is a deeper yellow it's a more committed yellow and then i paint big roses on top of that yeah um and was that because you had coming someone coming to visit that's right yes i first i had beige colored walls you know i had sort of old parchment kind of look and then i had the roses on top of that and i thought you know it's a little bit sad and less colorful and then these japanese guys were coming from the the big department store where i had an exhibition in japan and they were coming to visit me and so i thought quickly i'll just i'll paint and so i just took you know about three or four different shades of yellow and i just painted very quickly and badly around these roses and i love the effect it's beautiful and actually that ended up being a wallpaper design didn't it for the day that's right that's right shergills came and looked at it and she said i want this as as a furnishing fabric and a wallpaper and so they they did it and then your cupboards your beautiful cupboards um which matched my trousers when i came to see you completely unintentionally those cupboards were just big white cupboards and they and and if for a long time you know brandon and i would sit in that room and they would have this big like white fridge at the end of the room it was just and brenda kept saying you've got to paint something on those doors because they're just awful being white and so eventually i just went down and i painted these big blue and white parts and you know kind of indian look yeah and they they hide your quilt collections that's right um it's just it's it's just the most beautiful beautiful thing now talking of collections um you do have a huge collection of buddhas and in your book you say it's because it reminds you of your mother they've got children climbing all over her and i mistook that to mean because your mom had five children i was like well she must have always had kids climbing but that wasn't actually what you meant no because this was an old buddhist monk you know who used to go out into the neighborhood with it with a great big sack full of toys and and things for children and and you know he's always there with his sack as as this buddha and he's kind of a big rotund figure very generous body and a great big head a bald head and i don't and then these little children on him i for some reason that symbol is just so delightful to me there's the patterns that the children are wearing and the pattern that's around his robe and on his sack and so forth so i was just you know i collect those wherever i find them and i find them all over the world you know when we went to vietnam we found amazing ones in vietnam and sometimes in american antique shops i'll find them so forth so do you remember i mean because you do have a vast pottery collection and they are beautifully put in color order on your shelves um i i know when i shared a photo of it the number of women that went uh i would hate to dust that that's a whole other story uh we're not gonna let that get in the way of a pottery collection um do you remember where you picked up every single piece probably not anymore but but there was a period you were i would i was very aware you know what little you know uh car boot sale or or you know some little funny antique shop i would find in the world because i would always come back to my travels with things in my suitcase you know small bits of china and tiles and things you know that was always part of the booty of of travel and it's been realistically since the 1990s since you you you met brandon and brandon took over the running of the studio that has allowed you both to travel it started off with australia but you've uh you know america europe um just all over um and so and that's allowed you to then bring all of these things back yeah is it fair to say is is brandon the home maker in terms of uh you know you you collect these things who arranges them how like brandon's first person i would say that he is a homemaker he he's uh he's he's a cancer uh and i'm sagittarian which means that i'm my mind is anywhere but organized i'm not a details man and brandon is more of a details person and he's also um somebody who likes a family order you know he likes the idea of a carpet on the floor well you know i'm i would buy carpets and i'd roll them up and put them in the closet or and bring them out occasionally and throw them over a table or something as decoration it never occurred to me to actually put it on the floor like where it was meant to be and so ben's you have to have a carpet on the floor and we and we have to have a sofa i said oh these old chairs will do you know so so you know he made a kind of order in the studio that was just brilliant um and and and he brings that that civilization to it all he does and he's now helped by uh by bundle um who firstly has the most fantastic name and she's she's australian isn't she well she's english but she was in australia okay she was very settled in australia when we found her and we were saying to to her boss at that time she was working for a shop and we were saying to her about you know we need we need uh somebody to work in our studio and she said to us you need a bundle and we said yes but she's living here she's not going to come and then it turned out that she had family in england that she wanted to come back and visit with and so she gave up her time in australia and moved here and she's been brilliant at working out patterns and helping me design and and you know and doing all of the the travel documents and the and the workshop details and all that stuff that we get involved with you find the right people this is what i see in your life is that you find the right people when you're open to it you find the right people will will absolutely present themselves much like debbie patterson who's done the photography for the book which is stunning as ever with her work you worked with steve lovely for 30 years um and yeah and when he decided to go back to the states that left a gap yeah and then i've interviewed all these different um photographers and i could tell that they just wouldn't understand my my love of color that that wasn't interesting to them you know they were they were like people that were very too too detailed for me i needed somebody who's going to have a kind of a colorful eye anyway debbie's i opened her portfolio and she doesn't even remember this picture but i remember i can see it as clearly now at the edge of a field of lavender she had a little there was a little tray and on that tray was a blue chipped enamel teapot against this lavender and then there was a little sack of garlic in a in a lavender sac like what you're wearing the color you're wearing a little mesh lavender sac with garlic in it and then this little blue teapot and then the lavender flowers in the field i said who who's this person this is this is it this is who i want and uh she came to work for me and we have gone through book after book after work and we work at a great pace and we've just finished a book that we did in lafanum you know that wonderful town in england you know the beautiful old half timbered structures and wonky and fabulous and full of color and we just had a ball and it's one of the most elegant books i've ever done i'm really really happy with it and that's going to come out soon i'm very excited for that we're talking about the studio books i shouldn't get too distracted with that but it it is it's so lovely to have your studio um depicted in glorious color uh you know you know that that is and and it isn't your beautiful job laying it out don't you feel you're there you know like in the painting studio the palace and the visceralness of it you know i i thought when i did this it was like it was almost too easy to do you know because debbie and i know this how so well because we've done room sets and we've done all sorts of shots here and when she went through and did her photographs we were both thinking oh is this going to be that special because we know it so well well when the rest of the world we're aching to see it i know and when i opened the book i saw what you guys see you know some i got this place it's amazing you know branson said i can't believe i live here you know because we were so we were so shocked at what it actually came out like on the page that came out so much the texture and the reality of this place but framed in the in in these beautiful i mean the layout i think of the book is just exquisite do you think sometimes it helps to see your life through someone else's eyes because that's effectively as soon as you employ a photographer to do that that's exactly what it is it's how it's their take on your vision and let me tell you something for a control freak like me is very difficult to trust somebody else to make a picture of my life and present it but when i do i'm always you know like very often we'll have not very often but occasionally we'll have a contest where i'll say here's here's the latest fabrics that i've designed let's see what quilts you can make out of this well the ideas that come in are so fresh and so the quilters of this world are so brilliant at putting together what i've designed that i can't believe it i mean i'm i'm just in awe of other people's creativity yeah but it's like um it's cooking isn't it you know if you have great ingredients what you produce is going to be fabulous and that's what you give us you give us great ingredients there's there's just no two ways about that i'm very grateful to people like you and the other people in my life who understand what i'm doing because it's not a given there's a lot of people who look at what i'm doing and they're completely flummoxed they can't they're complete they they just think it's chaotic and crazy and and for people who see the beauty in what i'm doing and and and take it and make their own thing out of it i'm so grateful for that i can't tell you i i you know from the receiving point it's it's a gratitude for having someone with your vision and your love of color and from a personal perspective you know you and brandon have been incredibly um gracious and generous with your time and your knowledge for me and you have taught me i mean i know it's a tip of the iceberg but you've taught me so much and you know brandon will happily give up time on a sunday afternoon if i'm struggling to put some colors together refresh your show he will happily you know face time with me and go oh what have you thought about this and go through my fabrics and my fabric choices and that that was never anything that i expected or even hoped for the very first time that i met you i was terrified um and i because it was gay facet you know like oh my goodness and it was you know we had five minutes to meet before we went to air and spent two hours talking together it could have been disastrous you know what if we'd run out of things to talk about which we now know we're never going to do no not ever well i mean you could because you just i mean i was sitting here thinking okay we're having another interview all right i and then i thought wait a minute these questions are so perceptive i mean it just staggers me what you remember i mean you you you look through my books and you remember all this stuff and these details because it interests you i mean that's the thing is that when some when you're interested in something you register it don't you yeah and and what you say in them resonates for me and i'm like yes that is absolutely it you have vocalized everything that i felt and thought and never known how to say and you've given me a confidence with color that i didn't know that i had but it's so funny because when i sit and i talk to you i have so many things going through my head when you're when you're saying about this this buddha who gives to children and and i'm thinking but that's brandon he goes with you to india and comes back with a car full of balloons the children you know like you have your own buddha he's there in your life yeah and you said and he's equally good with older people like he would find all of the kind of old people who were nervous in the studio or in our workshops and say to them i'm going to be your friend and then he would help them to to flourish people always flourish under his guidance his eye you know which is always brilliant it's a dream team for sure an absolute an absolute dream team and you know i could i could happily talk to you for hours about all of this and i know i've got notes and notes and notes here and i will kick myself for not having discussed x y and z with you the minute that we come off air um and i'm just so grateful to you it's not the last time we're gonna meet darling oh no it's can we not do the whirling dervish thing though because you know that i think i'd get dizzy oh no yeah and and i couldn't do it anymore oh that was exhausting i mean that's i mean very very quickly then just to put that into perspective you learned to uh you learned to be a wedding dervish which is a kind of a form of meditation but in dance form is the best way i can describe it um and actually through that you've met the guy that's given you um your your sanctuary of your bathroom because you met rupert through it that's right you also um met uh philip through it as well jacobs yes absolutely maybe there's something in this whirling dervish malarkey maybe i should go and have a spin [Laughter] well to go and watch it sometime is quite quite beautiful quite wonderful i remember this this um uh islamic woman she must been egyptian i think she came to watch us one day and she just sat on a chair and she she must have been about 70 and beautifully dressed and beautifully covered and she sat there and she just wept from the beginning to the end and i as i was turning i kept looking at her and i thought what we're doing and the music and everything else is moving you so much that you're moving me you're making me understand that what we're doing is something very special and it is i mean it's it's a prayer it's it's it's it's an active prayer it's it's funny it's very special and i suddenly when you're talking about it it's making me miss it but but it was the hardest work i've ever done in my life to keep your arms up you know for for uh 45 minutes going around this whole ceremony was very very hard work it's phenomenal i mean you described philip jacobs as a man that looks more like a rugby player or a builder maybe it's the dervishing maybe it's that whirling that's given him that great upper body and collecting dinosaur bones well he does that as well dragging dinosaurs off the jurassic coast you know that's another past time but it's i mean really to close one of the last things that you write in your book is about painting and about how disciplines scares you and yet talking to you you are one of the most disciplined people i have i've ever come across the whirling dervish takes massive discipline to swim every day takes discipline um finishing projects you know if you start designing you don't finish it and that that th this is what i've learned from my teachers in life natasha you know that these wonderful artists and these incredible minds that i've met who taught me stick to it you know if you start something go ahead and finish it it doesn't matter if halfway through it you realize it's a disaster it's not going to work it's a failure finish it and then have a judgment but but by finishing it you will learn something that is invaluable and that's more than making money from selling something or anything else we need to learn and a little bit of suffering which comes with doing something that's very hard work and that you want to break away from and you want to run away from by sticking to it and putting in that that energy you learn something very deep uh and that do you know what that is that is a philosophy i i hope to pass on to my children and it's it's true it's just so true oh okay thank you so much well thank you darling how lovely to have your mind looking at my world ah it's an absolute pleasure anytime anytime and uh and let's let's talk again when lavenham comes to fruition yes yes english village quilts we'll do that perfect can't wait you take care lots of love to brandon bye bye darling bye bye bye yeah

Channel: Natasha Makes

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Id: fiM_cfUqiOg

Length: 110min 43sec (6643 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021