The Laini's Ladies Story

Here are two new Laini's Ladies -- I've only just designed them, so they will be debuting at trade shows this summer and will be in stores in fall. I love the way they turned out, and I love the quotes. I got both quotes off of blogs, too: the "cup of tea" quote is from Deirdre, and the "fairy tales" quote is from Amber. Thanks, ladies!

I've been meaning to write a little "story of Laini's Ladies" here so I could link to it from my website, so here it is:

For the origins of Laini's Ladies, I have to go back four or five years to my discovery of two things: paper arts/stamping/scrapbooking stores; and Somerset Studio magazine. I had been doing oil painting illustration, spending all day, day after day, at my easel, painting detailed things like this:

And I had started to incorporate collage into these (see on the wolf's quilt?), and started to branch out into little projects "just for fun" such as making weird little collage people as gift tags for all my family's holiday presents. They were so much fun! Here's on of those from that first batch:

They were collaged, laminated, and then riveted with little eyelets so their arms and legs swiveled. (This is a great project to do with kids, by the way. SO fun!) Well, another year went by of painting and selling my prints at the Portland Saturday Market on weekends, and then the next Christmas season rolled around. My crafty friend Maggie was having a Christmas card-making party, and I didn't want to haul my whole studio of supplies over to her house so I thought up a new version of a "lady" I could make as a holiday card. She would be laminated, have a tiny little waist I could tie a ribbon around, and have little dangling bead feet. So I did the design work in advance, went bead-shopping (I {heart} bead shopping!) and assembled them at Maggie's. I loved them! I made more!

Two weekends before Christmas I premiered my first six designs at the Saturday Market and. . . sold out by lunchtime!!! My brain was whirring. It might have been snowing that day but I didn't get cold. I made more $$ than I had ever made at the Saturday Market and I was thrilled. For the next couple of weeks I did very little besides cut out my litte dolls and wire up their little hooks and feet (I was a bit awkward with it at first, not having done much jewelry making or wirework of any kind, but I learned through much repetition. And then the season was over, the market was shut down, and I had two months ahead of me to just design and dream. And I spent it developing my first complete line of Laini's Ladies and yes, shopping for beads!

By May things were still going well and I had a sales record and accounts in five or six states including Florida and Hawaii, so I decided to take the leap of going to the New York Stationery Show. This wasn't an insane leap because I wasn't getting a booth there, but just planning to walk around the convention floor and see what was what. And what I saw was that there was nothing in the whole show even remotely like my Ladies. Which I took to be a good thing! Now, I'm not a real natural networker. I have to suck up my courage, calm my heartbeat, and go forth, sort of pretending to be a businesslike, confident artist. It's exhausting and can be really un-fun. Jim and I had to do that for several years at the San Diego Comicon in order to make the connections necessary to get our graphic novel published, and I had to do it at SCBWI conferences to meet editors and agents when I was working on Blackbringer. It's hard. But necessary. So I talked to as many people as would talk to me in New York that weekend, and I began to learn about licensing, and I was lucky enough to meet Tom Bottman!

By "lucky" I mean this quote by Thomas Jefferson: "I am a great believer in luck. I find that the harder I work, the more of it I have." !!!

Tom was intrigued by my little winged ladies and he contacted me the week after the show (Oh, I had made mini "me" ladies as business cards, complete with beads and ribbons, with my face, so people would remember me) and we went from there. It's been a few years now and it's a great partnership. I do the design and the Bottman company does all the rest. Some artists would want to go in a different direction and do everything themselves, start their own company, the way Anahata has (who I met at that first Stationery show, and who, I believe, is there now) -- but I knew the business stuff was NOT for me. So that's the story of how Laini's Ladies came to be: through playing around with new materials, making things for gifts, allowing myself to fall into a new fascination. That happens to me, it has since college:

One year when I was supposed to be studying for finals I got obsessed by making clay puppets. Another year, I saw a girl doing watercolors on the roof of my building in Berkeley and I had to go buy a set. That watercolor set, I am SURE, set the stage for me going to art school four or five years later. And when I first opened that paint box at the age of . . .20? I had no notion what to do. I was as clueless as if I'd just decided to take a radio apart and put it back together! But you learn, if you keep with something. When I taught illustration a few years ago I told the students that anyone could learn to draw if they really want to, but you can't just wish it idly, you have to really really want it, and then, you know, learn it.

Follow your creative whims, too. If you feel like doing collage, do it. If you should be painting, but you really want to make a puppet, make a puppet! Play! Have fun! That's rule one. Play. And later on, show people. That's kind of it, boiled down. Play, and then show people. Have at it!