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What started with binge watching TV has led to millions of productsand a feature among the wardrobes of the Big Apple Circus performers.
Lifelong Nashvillian Sarah Mason Walden was pregnant when her doctor prescribed bedrest. 'I was watching Project Runway when Heidi Klum challenged the contestants to design their own original fabrics,” Walden recalls. She was fascinated. 'I thought, I should try that!”
Lucky for us, she did. Walden, a singer-songwriter and veteran of Nashville's music circles, mastered a shareware graphic-design program and founded Peacoquette Designs. Now, five years later, her complex and color-drenched prints have made their way onto a million dollars' worth of clothing, lingerie, handbags, wallpaper, lampshades, pillows, and other home goodsoh, and costumes for the Big Apple Circus.
Walden starts each design with a single striking image, sometimes from her own original photography, sometimes from public-domain archives (like those of the British Library or the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles). Other times, it's an image she creates from scratch. She then builds outward from that single image, using repeats, inversions, and scale variations, among other embellishments, to create a rich, layered design.
'When an image is placed where it belongs, it feels organic,” Walden explains. 'People respond to that pleasing ‘rightness' on an emotional level.”
And then there's the Peacoquette color. Walden saturates her prints with intense, evocative pigments, which she 'mixes” herself. You won't find a preset color palette here, and that makes Walden's designs especially fresh and eye-catching. It also lets her satisfy precise custom requests.
'I've matched colors from china patterns, wedding dresses, vintage illustrations, bathroom tile, and many other textiles,” Walden says. 'It's one great thing about living these days: We can make so much personalized, and that lets us express exactly who we are.”
Walden's Peacoquette designs are licensed wholesale to large-scale producers through The Pattern Boutique of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. But individuals and smaller producers can orderand customizeWalden's fabric, wallpaper, and giftwrap designs through Spoonflower.com. The Durham, North Carolina, company uses high-tech digital inkjet printing in the movement to revive the North Carolina historic textile industry.
At Spoonflower, you can purchase a Peacoquette design by the yard on 20 different fabric types, from basic cotton to faux suede to silk crepe de chine. You can then use that fabric yourself to make clothing, accessories, upholstery, drapery, and other textile homewares. For a bit more of a jump-start, a Spoonflower spinoff, Sproutpatterns.com, offers ready-to-sew kits for items like skirts and shirtdresses in Peacoquette-designed fabrics.
Walden always considers requests to customize prints, like altering colors or adjusting a pattern's size or repeat scale. And for smaller goods, Walden offers Peacoquette Designs on placemats, lamp shades, stationery, and other gifts items through Zazzle.com.
Walden's fans are many, including home creatives and commercial designers alike. The latter choose Peacoquette designs for their own labeled goods, like a blouse from Australia's Antola Trading or a messenger bag from Timbuk2. 'Collaborating with me on custom fabric lets emerging designers produce unique, attention-grabbing collectionseven on a small scalewhile keeping quality high, costs reasonable, and production regional,” Walden notes. 'Peacoquette lets fashion and homewares designers source custom, world-class prints right here in Nashville, with personalized design attention and manageable prices.”
Thanks to her, we might never wear solids again.
Laura Fitzgerald Cooper