Cape Town designer and illustrator Heather Moore — the creator of Skinny Laminx — finds inspiration in strange and wonderful places: junk shops, a walk in the Company’s Garden collecting oak leaves, even a stack of mugs and cups after an afternoon tea party (the latter design is called “When Everyone Came to Tea”).
Her distinctive African-Swedish aesthetic (her fabrics have been compared with the iconic ranges from both Marimekko and Ikea) has given Moore’s products — which include tea towels, cushion covers, aprons, table runners and napkins — a devoted following abroad and at home, driven in part by her low-key but savvy approach to online retailing (she sells her wares on both Etsy.com and Supermarket) and her brilliant website-cum-blog at www.skinnylaminx.com. Moore recently opened South Africa’s first dedicated Skinny Laminx retail space at the Silk & Cotton Co in Cape Town.
Her latest fabric design is a graphic rendering of a pincushion protea (Leucospermum cordifolium), which started out as a vinyl wall decal.
“A lot of my designs come from doing something else. I like to do paper cuts with a knife. The pincushion design hung around my studio for a while and then it got another life. I messed around on the computer and it became a fabric print.”
Moore scans or photographs the cut-out image she wants to use and traces it on her computer in Illustrator.
Then she works with the size and spacing of each motif so that it fits perfectly on to a printing screen, ensuring that the designs match up and can be tiled. “That part can become tedious,” she says. “It can look beautiful, but it can be out by 2mm. You have to keep adjusting it. It’s very satisfying to get it right.”
Once the design is ready to be transferred on to the screens at the printers, each screen is painted with a light-sensitive emulsion.
It’s essentially a photographic process in which a negative image is created with emulsion, which is then set under bright light. The emulsion is washed off, leaving gaps on the screen through which the ink can be pressed.
The next challenge is printing on to fabric. “It’s an endless battle with South African fabric suppliers,” Moore says, “and so many mills have closed down. But if you don’t print on to the right fabric it doesn’t look beautiful.” Moore is currently printing on a cotton-linen blend sourced from local textile manufacturer DaGama.
Once the fabric is printed, it’s left to dry before going through a heat- curing process, “like a long oven on rollers”, Moore says, to set the ink. Moore then takes the fabric “to little people all over the city. I haul the roll up a flight of stairs to a lady with scissors, then to another with a sewing machine. I don’t use sweatshops, but it’s a very sweaty process”.
For more information, go to www.skinnylaminx.com or visit the Skinny Laminx shop in the Silk & Cotton Co showroom in Somerset Road, Greenpoint