Aster and Oak.

What does an average day look like in the land of Aster and Oak?
Wake up, feed the kids and I, say goodbye to hubby for the day and then try to juggle motherhood and Aster & Oak all at once! I am blessed to be able to work from home, but I will say the house is looking rather crowded these days and my sleep is generally less than 5 hours a night!

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What made you want to start a bubba clothing label?
My son who is now 5 had severe skin allergies as a baby which made him miserable and ended up lasting years. Even after doctors, creams and elimination diets we never did end up finding the cause of it. When my daughter was born she started showing the same signs of allergies and I decided enough was enough and vowed to cut out as many chemicals and allergens from our lives as I could. Living in a small town the organic/chemical free range of products was limited and coupled with a background in design, I started dreaming up ideas to make my own! Aster & Oak was such a natural progression and sort of took on a world of its own!

Do you design all of your fabric prints?
Yes! Every print is designed and hand drawn by me. I have always loved to drawn, paint, doodle! Each exclusive print is lovingly hand illustrated to be as delightful, fun and unique as the babes who wear them.

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Tell us a little about how you design your pieces. How does a piece go from an idea to a physical product.
For starters it is a REALLY long process. When the idea of Aster & Oak came to me, i honestly never thought there would be so much too it! I take pride in knowing all of Aster & Oaks prints are unique and 100% original 🙂

I start out by sketching patterns, characters and throwing around ideas on paper. Once I have a theme in mind, I visualise the colours to go with it and import my sketches to my graphic editing program. A lot, I mean A LOT of playing around later I have some digital illustrations to use. After bit more playing and repeating illustrations, we then have a pattern. It is very time consuming, but it’s my favourite part of this job 🙂

The next stage is to pick the fabric. I always use 100% organic cotton fabric and I spent months perfecting the quality, softness and stretch for ours. Our fabric is then printed in 100% organic dyes and left to dry. While this is going on, I start on the design files. These contain the details of each style of clothing including colours, sizing, trims, fabric weight, pattern size, stitching requirements amongst other things. Once all these are done we submit them to the manufacturer to receive samples.

Once the samples arrive, I make any tweaks needed, adjust the sizing if needed and then approve the samples and move onto bulk production. Once this is complete I organise photography, press releases, look books and everything in between. All this takes between 6-7 months! Phew!

Why do you use organic cotton for your garments?
I chose organic cotton because of my children’s skin allergies, as I mentioned before and also, it just made sense to use something that is grown without the use of harmful pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilisers. Ordinarily cotton is processed using dyes, bleach and a host of other unhealthy chemicals that have been attributed to allergies, eczema and even cancer. Organic cotton, on the other hand, is free from all artificial additives.

Where can people find you?
I am still a big fan of Facebook and Instagram, so you will find me there most days 🙂

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