South African designer and illustrator Heather Moore makes textiles and homeware out of good vibes and sunshine. With a background in illustration, she creates clean illustrated patterns which she then screenprints onto the fabric that is cut and sewn into products like cushions, tea towels, and table runners. The result is both uplifting and playful – that colorful touch you’d want to add to your living room.
“My inspiration comes from ordinary, everyday things like cactuses, teacups, staircases, and vibracrete walls,” she told You Are Brave, noting her sources of inspiration. “I usually have a notebook with me, where I make sketches, and I take a lot of photographs of textures, details, juxtapositions, and compositions that seem to give me ideas.”
The owner of the Skinny laMinx brand (named after Moore’s Siamese cat), Moore’s career path wasn’t a straight line. “After 10 years of illustration, I needed a change, so in 2006 I took a half-day job as a comic’s scriptwriter and spent the rest of my day messing around in my studio on Long Street,” she recalled. “I started blogging about my work, and opened an online shop on Etsy. People around the world started reading my blog and buying my things, and I got some wholesale orders to the USA, and suddenly I found that I was a designer with a design business.”
Now with almost 40k followers on Instagram, Moore is a busy bee. “The Skinny laMinx recipe is simple,” reads her website, “Mix together a love of pattern, a cute shop, a top notch team, and top it all off with equal parts playful and chic.”
