Feeling very happy that spring is finally here. Our studio can get a bit chilly over winter but with the sunny days we have been getting here in Melbourne we can start to thaw our icy toes!

Harvest Textiles was hatched at the beginning of 2010. It is hard to believe it has only been 18 months as we have managed to cram in so many good times. 

I think for all three of us Harvest is the manifestation of many long held dreams. It came about because essentially we all love making things and chatting. We enjoy meeting new people and creating happy, inclusive spaces so it seemed to be a very natural step to take to combine our making skills with our social skills. We wanted to start teaching screen printing classes in a professional studio context and to create a space that fostered people’s interest and our own in making quality products by hand and so Harvest Textiles was born. Our workshops are a forum for people to come together and exchange ideas and get away from the stresses of their everyday. People can enter our professional studio environment - Harvest Workroom - and that inspires and fosters their creative talents. We began hosting workshops in printmaking as it is our area of expertise but the intention was always to collaborate with other designers and invite them to share our space and host workshops in their field. We also produce our label where we use our screen printing prowess to make hand screen-printed clothing, homewares, yardage and handmade DIY contemporary kits. That keeps our creative juices flowing and all three of us are very conscious of that because when you are running a business it can become overwhelmingly administrative if you allow it!

Harvest Workroom (our studio) is situated on Lygon Street, East Brunswick in Melbourne’s traditional textiles heartland. It is a very unique space that we fell in love with as soon as we found it. We knew we wanted a space that could house all of our screen printing needs on a professional scale and also somewhere big enough to host our workshops, events, exhibitions and other designers as artists-in-residence. It also needed to be a place that could comfortably host all of our children when they needed to tag along to work with us and so an outdoor area and a homely kitchen was also something we were very keen on.We have two retail spaces, a large workshop space that houses our ten metre print table, wash trough, cosy kitchenette and production area and then an office area that is rented out to local designers and that occasionally when we need to focus on bookwork and admin we also inhabit. We have a generous outdoor space that at this stage looks a little bit ghetto but over the coming months we are working with a sustainable landscape architect to create our little patch of inner city eden that can be used as an everyday retreat from the workplace but also as a venue for workshops and events. All in all it is a pretty fun place to be.

Our whole business philosophy is based around people stopping to take time out from their everyday lives to make things with their own hands and also to look at the world through a more sustainable lens. Our workshops give people that opportunity to put aside time to engage in a project but we wanted our textiles range to imbue that notion too. And so we conjured up the MakeKit range…where people can choose to hand make all of our ready-made products using a contemporary DIY kit. We feel like people will connect with the product much more if they have spent time making it themselves, it gives them the opportunity to customize it and it makes craft very accessible as all they need to do is follow our very easy step-by-step instructions. By making the product themselves people will have more emotional attachment to it and so they are less likely to just throw it out at the end of a season.

Yes our studio has a fantastic community feel…in fact it is sometimes difficult to get work done as there is always something fun happening there.We rent permanent studio space out to local makers Dawn Tan, Emily Green and Indie Ladan. All of us help each other out and bounce ideas off each other and cook up yummy meals for each other. We also generally have an artist-in-residence or a popup store happening and that brings with it a whole lot of action.Combine all of this with a steady stream of students attending workshops, ex-students popping by for cups of tea and to use our open studio access, university interns, our children playing cubbies and hide-and-seek under the print table and our families popping in and out throughout the day. We have definitely created the space that we envisaged when we we first set out - a happy place for people to create and where our families could thrive.

Yes people are very interested in this concept in Melbourne. It feels like it is a response to the online and technology driven lives…people are keen to get their hands dirty and step away from the screen for a moment. There also seems to be much more appreciation from consumers about products that have been handmade locally with love and care rather than mass produced offshore…people are thinking more about the environmental and social impacts a product might have rather than just how “cheap” it might be in the short term.

From the beginning we have all felt really passionate about creating a business that we feel proud of and that meant that it had to focus on hand made, community and sustainability. From a textiles perspective we wanted to create a brand that was about using sustainable, organic or locally produced materials to create contemporary designs that are fun and beautiful at the same time. Our DIY kits also tie in to this approach. (see answer above) Our sustainable bent definitely impacts many of our decisions from what fabric we order, what inks we print with, which local sewers we use, to what paper we print a swing tag on and who we use to print our promotional brochures. We also incorporate the sustainable mantra into our workshops by using organic fabrics in our classes, hosting some of our workshops around reuse of our fabric offcuts or vintage wallpaper and we seek out guest teachers who are thinking in these terms too. We try our hardest to stay true to this aspect of the business and it is an ever-evolving process. We hosted a great series of workshops and events based around the principals of reusing and upcycling materials in July this year called MakeUp showcasing a range of local designers who use up-cycling to enrich the story of their products. That event really seemed to sum up our business in a nutshell.

We find many of the local makers and designers very inspiring and motivating - it’s such a great city where it feels like anything is possible as there is always a supportive audience ready to get excited with you. We also find people who create businesses and workplaces that enable them to do what they love doing very exciting. Also people who work hard and make sure they are the best at what they do - we keep coming across great people like this through our business.

There is so much going on around here….we tend to respond to whatever comes our way and so don’t plan too far ahead. The best way to stay in touch is by joining our mailing list.