heather ross q&a

This week it’s my great pleasure to have Heather Ross join me. If you don’t know Heather, you should. Whether it’s through her fabrics or new book or blog – everything she creates has a lovely, breezy-but-strong and very evocative pull: I want to read more stories, see more fabric, try more of her projects. Not to mention crash her parties to hear stories in person about skidding up frozen driveways in reverse and plunging into the cold ocean at Coney Island.

Heather was kind enough to answer some of my questions below, and she'll be back on Wednesday to answer yours. So leave any questions that bubble up from this interview in the comment section below, and check back later this week. Plus, Heather's giving a book away to a lucky reader -- simply leave a comment or post and you're entered in the drawing!

KW: Welcome Heather, it’s really great to have you here. I know that you grew up in a one-room schoolhouse in Vermont. And I grew up in a renovated barn in Virginia. For a while, when my parents were turning the barn into a home, we didn’t have plumbing downstairs, and my mom would follow me and my sister up a hay ladder to take a bath. And instead of furniture, we had a big radial-arm saw on the second floor. I know that environment was a big influence on me. How do you think growing up in that one-room schoolhouse helped shape you?

HR: The schoolhouse was actually one of several very unconventional living situations that my sister and I like to blame for our inability to clean our own houses. But of course, it was perhaps the most lovely and the most special. It was also incredibly isolated, so we were really depending on our imaginations to stay occupied. And, for better or for worse, we had huge amounts of unstructured and unsupervised time beginning when we were quite small. For us, it worked.

KW: I have such a personal connection to your fabric and your book, and I think that’s because of all the stories you share about growing up in Vermont: river swimming and fireflies and wild chamomile. Now you live in the city – how do you reconcile your rural upbringing and now-urban life? Do you miss those toads and critters that appear in your fabric?

HR: Honestly, its hard. I don't think that a single day has gone by since I left Vermont 18 years ago that I haven't missed it. Leaving the tiny town that I grew up in was so necessary, but so heartbreaking. I think it drives so much of my art and writing because I remain so haunted by it. I do go back, occasionally, and its always complicated. There is always a piece of me that wants to rip up my return ticket or drive my rental car into the river and just stay. The landscape feels like its a part of me, but I could never really find my place in that community. I think I could try my whole life and never quite fit in. My friends were mostly imaginary, and usually four legged and furry.

Heather hanging up doll clothes in VermontThere is a great joke I love to tell: A man leaves Boston and moves to a small town in northern Vermont. Every day he stops by the little village store for food or gas and every day he sees an older man, a real Vermonter, sitting in front of the woodstove. Every day The Old Man finds a way to remind The Man from Boston that he is not a local, not a Vermonter... and he will never be. Finally, after two decades, the man from Boston approaches him and says: Look, Old Man, I know that no matter how hard I try you will never accept me or consider me a Real Vermonter, but I find a great deal of comfort in the fact the my children are, indisputably, Real Vermonters. They were born here, they grew up here, they live here. They love it here. They have never known any other place. The Old Man looks The Man From Boston in the eye for a while and finally says: Well, I don't know about that. If your cat crawled into my oven and had herself some kittens, would you call them muffins?

But the swimming holes and old apple orchards always felt like home. You can love a place as a child, especially if you feel like its yours, without being distracted by the concern that it might not love you back. Its a lot like first love, maybe.

Loving New York is more like second love. Like loving the guy who you fell for in college who you kept telling yourself you should break up with (and run back to that really nice boy, Mr. Small Town), the good looking drummer who isn't any good and spends your money and gets your car towed... but takes you to great parties and introduces you to amazingly talented people and incredible adventures and opportunities and new ideas and takes you to fine restaurants and galleries....until he dumps you for your room mate. That Guy.

You get the idea. I'm going to stick it out for a while. Living here inspires me in so many ways, not the least of which is that it has amplified my aching for the forests and the fireflies and the swimming holes, which consequently won't stop appearing in my sketchbook.

And of course, after a lifetime of wondering what it would be like to live in a city full of art and fashion and good food.... now I know. And someday I'll head back into the woods for good.

Last summer someone decided that my apartment needed new smoke alarms installed. I wasn't informed, and came home late to find a sleeping husband, and crawled into bed without turning on the bedroom light. For about twenty minutes, I lay in bed looking up at a tiny blinking green light, awestruck by the idea that a firefly had somehow found its way into our apartment. I was so thrilled. Finally I couldn't contain myself anymore and woke up TC, and pointed up at what I thought to be a sign that we belonged in the country but what he knew to be our new smoke alarm. "Oh Honey." he said, with a look on his face that was pure love. "I know. Its a lovely firefly".

KW: Speaking of those critters, can you talk us through the process of designing new fabric lines and sewing patterns? Do you start with a clear idea, or does it emerge more slowly?

HR: It changes every time. With Mendocino it was about building a whole world around this one little girl and a mermaid that appeared in my sketchbook. With my new line, Far Far Away, it began with a donkey who thought of himself as a Unicorn, and then demanded a surly little princess. I'm really really not in charge.

KW: It’s one thing to design fabric and another to write a book that’s so infused with your life – not only the kind of clothes you design, but where you get peaches and how you spend your weekends. How does it feel to share so many parts of your life so widely?

HR: So easy. I am a terrible keeper of secrets and a compulsive over-sharer. And because I think that everyone should know about places like Warrups Farm in Redding, CT, or about Blueberry Hill Inn in Goshen Vermont.... because they are such special places.

KW: So what next for you, Heather? What new adventures are on the horizon?

HR: I am working on a few things, hoping to have more opportunities to write and illustrate. I would love to do another book, it was such an great experience. I have a few things ending right now, professionally, so I am trying to stay as open as possible to what happens next. As much as it makes the people around me a little nuts, I like to reinvent things every few years and am trying to keep things simple enough to allow that. My career goal, ultimately, is to be able to spend my days drawing and writing and then to disappear for a few weeks every summer without anyone noticing. A plan like that won't make me rich, I know, but thats OK.

Thanks so much, Heather! Can everyone please give a little clap in front of your computer for how great she is? Please leave your questions below and drop by on Wednesday for more about fabric and fireflies.