Tula's House - Episode 1 - The Concept

hi I'm Tula welcome to my house come on in let me show you around and show you all the good stuff starting to think about a new fabric collection it really isn't linear at all it sort of starts while I'm designing the previous collection in a lot of ways because I know that whatever collection comes after has to be the exact opposite of what came before it or not so much the opposite but has to sort of revolt against what came before it otherwise things start looking too much the same and one thing melds into the next and I really want people to be able to remember each individual line as if it was a person so I have to build this whole personality around one fabric line and hopefully by the end of it you would think that all the different fabric lines and their personalities would be friends but aren't necessarily the same person so I'm just coming off of designing Elizabeth which was based on Queen Elizabeth the first the thing I'm thinking about most when looking at Elizabeth and thinking about the one that'll come after it really sort of working against whatever this line represented so this had a lot of floral a lot of flowery elements in it which actually isn't something I do a lot it just seemed appropriate in this case and this one was all centered around the head of Elizabeth so the main portrait of the of Elizabeth there was one really strong focal piece and then everything else supported it and going into whatever my next collection is I know that I have two collections coming out before that that are going to be sort of more of a basics line and then sort of a basic backing collection so I know that I want those two collections to work into whatever comes next pretty seamlessly this is the first time I'll be working I'll be designing a collection knowing that it has to work with something else that's already going to exist so that's a new thing for me it doesn't have to be sort of a capsule all on its own it is going to have to exist with a couple of other fabric collections that will be out at the same time so this house used to be a barn it was built in the early 1800 and in the mid 80s the family that owned the barn sold off the main estate house that it's been in the family forever and renovated this actual horse barn carriage barn into a home so I found this house I was actually living on one of my mom and stepdad extra farm houses you know out here farmers as they acquire land they have homes on them sometimes and he was about to tear it down so I I was like don't tear it down I'll live in it until I figure out what I'm doing with this whole fabric design thing and I lived there for a few years and I was kind of ready to have my own place and I literally drove by this place the day they were pounding the sign into the yard the for sale sign we got up to this room in the house and we looked at each other and we both just said like this is where you're gonna live this is it it was sort of everything I've ever wanted a studio to be it was blank it was white you know so that I could fill it with all my color and all of my prints and all of my crazy one of the first things we saw when we walked in up on this level is this pink marble fireplace so this hakeem the fireplace came from the original sort of mansion house that this was the barn - the plantation house and this was the barn to this sort of magnificent house that's about a half a mile away and when they renovated it sold the main house and renovated this into the barn they pulled a lot of things from that main house and put them in the barn and one of them was this one of the pieces they brought over was this like huge pink fireplace and all marble and when your last name is pink and you walk into a house that has a pink marble fireplace I mean I feel like that's a sign if ever there is one so it was kind of one of the first standout things and the thing we always went back to like when I when we moved in it was like what do we do with a fireplace because it was such a cool thing I'm also never cold so I never use it but it's nice to know that it's here everything I make is all sort of housed in these walls and it's probably the truest example of my personality and I tend to be a little bit difficult to get to know and I always say like you can know me better by looking around this room then you would ever do if you talked to me because if you talked to me I'd probably just give you the runaround and not tell you anything so I really think of this place as like if you could actually go inside my brain and walk around this is what it would look like my grandma when I was 12 no one in my family sewed has really ever sewed and when I was 12 for Christmas my grandma bought me like $100 sewing machine from you know Target or Kmart or something when I was working from just because it was something that I could use to make things I didn't have you know it was just like well she could make something with this like let's give it a shot right and it took about three or four weeks for me to start cutting pillow shaped holes in all of my mom's Ralph Lauren curtains and you know like all of her nice stuff and so that got old really quickly so she took me to a fabric store and it just so happened you know when you look in the phone book under fabric it was a quilt shop if that first store on the list had been a dressmaking shop or a home deck fabric store it might have been really different starting this new collection I have a few parameters that I haven't had before that are be totally new so this is I just got these not too long ago which are the the new these are called cap sets with the salesman take out to show the fabric collection of my true colors collection which are my new basics collection with free spirit is I've never had this to work with before so I have all these great to color basic prints that are small medium sized prints which means in this next collection I can do something I've never been able to do before which is go big I can go big designs big images big colors and it can still work for quilters because they can work these into so this is actually pretty exciting for me because I usually I have a certain number of pieces that I have to design and typically I need to cover a lot of bases within those pieces so I need anywhere from six to eight designs going into a new collection and on and usually at least a third of those pieces need to be small-scale prints for quilters another third of those pieces need to be tonal or medium sized prints and then I usually have one or two pieces left that I can go really big on they don't have to be as usable in a general way but are the thing that draw you into the collection so I'm really excited going to into this one because I can make every single piece one of one of those big statement pieces this time which I've never really had the opportunity to do before so I'm pretty excited about that actually like getting excited all over again to remind myself I already did this so this is my sort of general sewing area I still make all my samples myself all of them if they're quilts that is I don't make dresses because I had no way at any point ever want to measure any part of my body so I tend not to make garments so I have all of my threads here from aurifil I might have my own thread collections with aurifil and they were nice enough to supply me with like a retail display because I require that much thread so I have all of sort of the tulip ink threads from aurifil which is super nice and more importantly I have all of my Bernina machines so I use Bernie nose exclusively have four years and so partnering with Bernina has been totally great because I always have sort of the newest stuff which is super fun but I have different machines because I'm often working on a lot of stuff at once so I like to have different machines set up that I can sort of jump to because like all sewers who do patchwork in little tiny pieces you tend to get bored and want to move on to the next thing and then you can go back to it later and I don't often have time to just stop so I sort of satisfy myself by having different projects at different machines if at the same time so that I can machine hop so I don't get bored this is my sort of cutting area all my rulers and blades and everything I need is sort of right in this general corner my ironing station my quilt wall where I can put stuff up and see how it looks so I would say I spend a good amount of my time I probably spend anywhere from two to eight hours a day sewing when I'm in studio so a lot of time is spent on this side of the wall for me the drawing is sacred so that is the most important thing that happens in this general area this is where I first come to in the morning I sit down here I answer all of my emails for the first two three hours of the day and then I usually will start drawing or go straight to the sewing area I draw here I compute here and this is sort of the heart of the design area and all my drawings kind of end up here at some point because the drawing for me is where it all happens the drawing is the most important part for me so that's like the drawing is sacred in my worldview so right now I'm thinking I know I'm going back to animals animals are where I live that's my thing it's what I do and now it's just about which animals I've kind of went out on the limb with the whole Elizabeth the first thing selling you know a few century-old dead Queen on fabric is a little tough so I need to sort of bring it back to what people are comfortable with a little bit so and that's going back to annals but I don't want to get too comfortable so I'm really thinking I need to go wild with this I need something exotic I do a lot of sort of domestic backyard animals I never ever do pets animal pets specifically people are too tied into what their pets are so I need to do things that people recognize and are familiar with but aren't necessarily something that they have intimate knowledge of the way it looks because when somebody really knows like a golden retrievers face if I draw it wrong or use some kind of artistic license because I want it to fit a certain way it becomes really obvious when it's an animal people are really really familiar with so on this one I'm thinking I need to go a little bit further out than what my norm is you know I do a lot of like squirrels and frogs and deer and things that are domestically very much around so I think that this next one needs to go a little bit outside that needs to be a little bit more a little bit Wilder a little bit more predatory in a way um not quite so sweet coming off of something so feminine I kind of want to like I don't know take it up a notch in a way this is probably my favorite place this is my sanctuary this is like where no one's allowed where I come to to sort of wind down from the day before I go to bed and this is sort of the room that houses all of my very most favorite things I like to be surrounded by things I've made or things I love this tapestry wasn't it's a quilt but I hang it like a tapestry sort of bridging that sort of 16th century old-world castle kind of thing I'm into with 21st century but this was one of the first big projects that my long-arm quilter angela walters and i worked on that wasn't sort of your typical quilt and this was for my fabric line perezville which was based on the life of Marie Antoinette and so I did these big silhouetted panels of one of the motifs in the fabric which was really a silhouette of Marie Antoinette and then she went in with with the long arm quilting machine and quilted in all the details so this is like a real maybe the purest version of my collaboration with Angela Walters because it's just straight up illustration and stitch and she did this you can see it really well on the back because the back has white on it but all those stitch lines that modeled and molded the silhouette into sort of a more three-dimensional form so this is probably one of my favorite things that we've worked on together because it's just it's it's the best of what I do which is drawing and the best of what she does which is long I'm quilting so I like it as a representation of sort of our best of the best and how we work together but this room is really this is my sanctuary this is like where I live this is where I calm down this is where I relax it is sort of the inner the inside of my brain where all my favorite things live I love to read I love history I love science fiction and TV and movies and storytelling and all those things live in this room there's lots of things in here that I totally love these little nesting dolls I painted which are my favorite things that one of my favorite things that I've made they all have really good cleavage just you know that's important I made this lamp shade and this really cute little lobster I did not make a friend of it made it for me I'm out of my fabric because that's what friends do they make lobsters for each other so this chair I made for my booth for my quote market booth last year for my fabric collection Elizabeth and I happen to find on Craigslist there was a church that was remodeling so these were like the altar chairs that the pastor's would sit in and they obviously had no vision because it was just plain wood so I helped them out and painted it a metallic hot pink which is how I think it probably originally wanted to be and then I upholstered it and sort of recovered it and made new cushions and everything and you know made it fit for a queen sorry so the other parameter sort of the other thing I'm working with here is I have the true colors so I have all my basic prints covered and then I also have my wide backings coming out for the first time I've never had white backings before so I also need to design a collection that makes sure that it utilizes every piece in of these six wide backings that I have coming out because that'll really affect the sale of these so I'm really right now trying to figure out what are the sort of business logistic parameters that I need to meet and once I know how to meet those I can wipe that out of my mind and just go into full creative mode and just start drawing but once I have it in my head those kind of points I need to hit in order to make everything work together it just becomes sort of a part of my DNA for that collection and I can move into creative and it will naturally inject itself into the process because I'll always be sitting in the back of my mind need to make sure I have something that has a little bit of gray a little bit of this purple a little Navy a little aqua a little orange a little red and then once all that happens I can just let the piece be whatever it needs to be so those are some of the things that I'm having to work with going into this line and once I fully understand those and sort of let them seep into my soul I can move forward and let it be whatever it is it's whatever this next one's going to be which hopefully is something pretty great otherwise you know I'll have to flog myself or something this is my guestroom slash quilt storage slash wall space for all the things I don't have important other rooms this room is sort of still under construction in a lot of ways I haven't quite settled on what it's going to be but for now it is where I store a lot of the quilts that aren't out in the world we've got about 150 quilts sort of out in the world right now so these are what's left behind for the time being so no one ever gets cold here you know you never run out of room for well we always have blankets so nobody will ever freeze here which is good and it always cracks me up when the twins are like I'm cold it's like you're in a house of blankets deal with it kid so these are a lot of sort of just quilts I've done over the years different things I'm in the process of working on this room right now I've got some things coming in for it but I designed this wallpaper for it which I'm pretty excited about which will be this is sort of my prototype of the wallpaper you know subtle but these are some of my drawings from the original drawings from different fabric lines over the years for me the fabric is all about drawing I'm an illustrator at heart so it always goes back to the drawings for me so that to me in a lot of ways is more valuable than the finished piece of fabric and so I love the process of everything like the process you know what they say it's like not about the beginning of the end it's about the journey which is a little sappy but kind of true so this is all sort of just different little process things that I've done that I'm proud of and so I prayed a moment I put them on the wall and hopefully one day this whole room will be just like covered with these just everywhere but so again a little bit empty but delightful well I got into designing fabric because I was quilting so I was working in the music industry and I was designing you know merchandise and music related ephemera for you know I was basically spending my days drawing like skulls and daggers and you know working with like Megadeth and Snoop Dogg and like oh you know just all those really crazy stuff and and to relax I'd go home and I'd quilt but it was like totally a secret because it would have ruined my street cred in the music industry if people knew I was at home like making you know granny crafts or whatever this is my kitchen which is probably the least used area of the house since I don't really cook I'm a great toast and that's about where it ends but I did make this little area very nice just in case I do happen to cook at some point and then somebody comes over and chooses to eat something that I cooked I have this nice little area where we can sit and have that I found the table on the street and I painted it under all this junk it says YUM and i sanded it all down and painted it and glossed it and all of that stuff a typewriter is pink and was a gift from my photographer Elizabeth Maxon who photographs all my books and again some of my leftover flower arrangement skills which are well you can judge that for yourself and then I made all the pillows most of the pillows here a friend of mine Karl made a few of them and the pictures on the wall back here are two Lacan's like tuna cans it was when I did my fabric collection Neptune so the two of the sea cans are sort of my little joke about my ocean line pretty much if it's not funny I'm not terribly interested in it so I try to keep things light and not too intense around here I'm intense enough on my own so everything in my house can't needs to be taken sort of lightly because I don't take things that seriously I just sort of have an idea of what I want to do and this is a real a real vulnerable stage for me because if my ideas get shot down I tend to respond to that with anger at this stage of the process because I'm all like insecure and whatever vulnerable is a better word um but I have some ideas of what I want to do now it's time to bring I need to bring someone else in because I can't work in a vacuum so I like to bring in my brother and my mom who work with me and they're really great feedback for me because they sort of represent my mom is like sort of the ideal demographic for this industry she is the classic mid 50s quilter that everybody always talks about as being the main demographic demographic for the sewing industry and then my brother is sort of the future you know he's not a sower he's going to look at things from a raw like is it cool is it not cool as somebody in their mid 20s he's going to see it in a totally different way and he's not related to sewing so he keeps me from getting stagnant while my mom makes sure I'm still meeting the goals of the industry that I'm in so now I guess it's time to bring them in and sort of lay it out on the table sort of what I'm thinking and they'll help me narrow down what's the most interesting and you know I'll kind of talk about what I can work with animal was the easiest and the best and and hopefully they won't make me angry okay so it's newline time pasta what do we got oh hey cats whoa tiger lion you're a pattern designer I think the shy girl with the tiger print that was more of a you know this guy's got the wild mane the Fabio hair he's out I feel like hippo and rhino are sort of the same thing rhinos freaked me out there like weird wimpy Triceratops house like it oh no it's like an antelope or like a okay don't even know okay and then this is the other one I know we've done about that one I have no idea that is freaking me out awesome at your head like they always are wearing try those oh it's a butterfly that's lovely it's actually an Atlas moth okay this is what's cool about this though

Channel: Quilt Videos

Views: 216,424

Rating: 4.8815751 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: X97qHypM1vQ

Length: 25min 8sec (1508 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2016