Deirdre Harris’ line of tea towels and dinner napkins is rapidly expanding to include coasters, cocktail napkins, business card sleeves, and more. She is integrating her architectural practice with her mother’s textile expertise to realize a latent love for graphic arts and handmade objects.
Deirdre takes full advantage of her studio space so that wherever you find agreeable natural light you will find piles of neatly folded silk-screened textiles. She has integrated her process with her studio so far as to know when and for how long to run the humidifier to slow the ink from drying in the desert air. Work in the morning prevents the heat in the afternoon and direct sunlight from affecting the process. She has found the time of day that provides the best light for photographing and is still struggling to find a non-beige background – if you know New Mexico architecture you’ll find that last bit funny.
As a Master Renderer at a landscape architecture firm in Canada, Deirdre honed her sense of color. Point at any wood trunk and she will call out the names of the Prismacolors needed to match the tree’s hues. She experiments and mixes all of her silk-screening inks.
Deirdre alternates between textile prints drawn from the designs found in her mother’s sketchbooks and her own graphics she’s refined over years. The sketchbook Deirdre showed us was from when her mom was fresh out of school in Iceland. There is an uncanny juxtaposition between the sense of family history and dialogue between generations and a timeless quality in the designs.
In Deirdre’s own words, “I spent all these months obsessing about my mother’s career and how little I understood of what she did until she wasn’t really able to teach me about it anymore, to a point where I was feeling a bit myopic about simply trying to understand. It’s good to be trying to learn from the trail of artifacts that I unearthed, and to be hoping that it’s going in even a smidge of a direction that she might have wanted it to at the time. I don’t think I’m going to take up figuring out that 10-harness loom any time soon, but I’m enjoying the sketchbooks!”
After getting her screen ready with the chosen graphic Deirdre washes and irons the linen fabric then cuts it into patterns, eg. tea towels. She proceeds to silk-screening using a cool rolling science cart salvaged from APS and finishes by hemming using her mother’s Bernina sewing machine.
Deirdre recently started employing white fabric. “Some people like natural. Some people like white. How do you know? It’s not like you can tell from looking at them.” Find out which one you like better and check out her Etsy store at www.sometimesjane.etsy.com
