A Creative Life speaks with Stephanie Housley, a textile designer and entrepreneur who founded embroidery company Coral & Tusk. She runs a global business through her Wyoming homebase, designing intricate pieces that are scaled to larger production yet retain their special character thanks to the stitch-by-stitch designs she creates. Her designs range from botanicals to newly imagined childhood tales.
Some snippets from their talk *edited for brevity:
Marcie McGoldrick on Coral & Tusk: "I think it's really difficult to create something that's distinct and truly unique and sets itself apart. And I feel like she's really done that with her brand. When you see it, you know it."
Melanio Gomez: Speaking about his first Coral & Tusk purchase, Very Hungry Bear pillow, which depicts a raccoon and a fox having tea inside a hungry bear's stomach.
"I bought it because I loved it, and I bought it in a shop in San Francisco when we were living there, and I thought, you know, there's got to be some kind of allegory or some kind of sort of lesson in this.....But what I love about it, and during our prep call, is that your images are so unique and they're almost dreamlike that they're coming from your head and that doesn't necessarily need an explanation to it....I love that idea that this is almost like a dream of somebody's that was illustrated on this pillow"
Stephanie Housley on her mom and upbringing: "Well, I think with my, you know, with my mom, I think the greatest gift she gave me was just a total spark of joy and a spark of awesomeness, meaning like she could be awe inspired by something so simple and something that most people would just pass by and disregard as a moment or something really beautiful of nature to observe or whatever it is. She really had a way of noticing and acknowledging the beauty in all things."
Stephanie on being an analog fan and the spark that started Coral & Tusk's: "Where it started was I had always done hand embroidery. So no matter where I would go for my entire life, I don't know why I would always just have a piece of fabric and a bag of embroidery floss and I would just make sketches of things. So like people's dogs or animals or homes, whatever. I would make a small fabric embroidery of that by hand. It was just something that I did instead of like watching TV or whatever.
On one of the many trips to India, I had insomnia and so I thought at the time I'm going to hand embroider a game. So I had this game called Memory when I was a kid. It's like a game that has like two of every type of photo or image and you you know they're all upside down then you make matches, right? I decided in this insomniac phase, I'm going to hand embroider a game that's all nautically themed A to Z.
I was doing that and then I thought like this is going to be 52 pieces, right? It's 26 letters of the alphabet, 52 pieces, and I'm going to have to make a container for it. So, like this is just not there's no way that I can do this all by hand, right? I was looking through Martha Stewart magazine and I saw a photo of her sewing room and I thought, I know that there's got to be a machine that can do what I want to do...."