I was delighted to be invited once again to design a collection of fabrics inspired by the Guthrie Theater’s summer musical. The copyright holders of this year’s show were very strict about how the show could be mentioned or quoted so I am not going to call it out by name, but it’s set in 1929 Berlin and revolves around a variety show in a risqué nightclub. I often use song lyrics from musicals as a starting point for designs, but given the sometimes dark and seedy subject matter for this show, that just wasn’t inspiring designs that felt like something someone would want to take home with them. And that is the point of designing things for the shop, after all.

So instead of being specifically inspired by the show, I looked to the broader landscape of the world in 1929 and dug into the Victoria and Albert Museum textiles collection looking for fabrics of 1929. You can see that inspiration up above. I looked at both the popular colors and shapes for both clothing and home decor fabrics.

I decided to do three different designs, each inspired by a different theme: music, love and art. We wanted to use the fabrics to make scarves, tea towels and small zip pouches, so I did both a portrait style design to put on tea towels and a repeating pattern for wearables.

“Music is the Universal Language” is the inspiration for the music themed designs. They feature silhouettes of musical instruments (trumpet, trombone, oboe and clarinet) and vibrant shades of pink. One of the songs in the show tells a story about a pineapple and so the love themed designs have pineapples and shades of cool green. The art themed designs are all about an artist’s role in bringing the light to dark times and are shades of moody purples and blues.

All of the art for these designs started as digital illustrations then layered together with hand-drawn and scanned textures. I really like the richness that those “imperfect” hand-drawn elements add to the designs. I repeated elements like parallel lines (which hint at music staffs) and radiating points (bright lights) to tie them all together. I designed, had professionally printed, and then sewed each piece of this collection.

It was by far the theater-inspired collection that I struggled with the most because it’s not a show that I particularly love, but I do love these fabrics. You can find these pieces and more exclusively at the Guthrie Theater Store. (They aren’t yet in the online shop, but they will probably be there later in the summer.)