Interview: Lilipopo

 

Hi,
I'm Kate from LiliPopo. I love to sketch and stitch so my shop is a mixture of embroidery patterns and stitched drawings alongside kits and some hand embroidered items.

 

My partner and I home educate our children so we both need flexible work.  He has to work outside the home so drawing, stitching and running an Etsy shop works perfectly for me as I can fit my working hours around my children.  I'm often stitching and helping with maths problems at the same time
 

I've always loved drawing.  Most of the rainy cold days in my childhood were spent drawing and I learnt to stitch as a child.  But it all stopped when I went to college to study French.  I started drawing and stitching again for my children.

My business began when I embroidered one of my drawings onto a little purse for my daughter and shared it on flickr.  A few fellow stitchers asked if I could sell the pattern, I opened an Etsy shop and so my business began.

A lot of my sketching is done while I'm doing other things, then when I get a few hours to myself I look through my sketch book to find something I want to develop and then work on it properly.  Some of these sketches stay as drawings and some become embroideries.  I use illustrator and photoshop to turn my drawings into clear patterns that can easily be stitched and traced.  I’m not very techy but my oldest son is and he has helped me find my way around these programmes.  

I am so inspired by fabrics.  Beautiful Liberty designs with tiny prints inspire me to make pixie dresses which I then appliqué onto my embroidered girls.  I save every scrap of liberty that I cut away as it makes perfect tiny bunting or even tinier butterflies.  I'm also inspired by lots of old children's picture books that we collected for the children but that I have kept for myself.  I absolutely love miniature worlds like those in the brambly hedge books.

I am working on embroidery kits at the moment, particularly kits for children and beginners, that I hope to have in my shop in the autumn.  They will involve robots and beetles.  I'm also working on some little tooth fairy cushions.  But I do have plans to do more drawing for next year, hopefully creating some lovely prints for children's rooms.

Thank you Kate for an inspiring strory!

To get to know more about Kate and her creations, please visit her shop, read her blog and find her on facebook.