Hello and Welcome to Jen Spilly Designs!
You’ve reached the hub for all of my passions. I am a maker, textile artist, surface pattern designer and dyer.
In my Handmade Shop, you’ll discover one-of-a-kind handcrafted and functional textile accessories featuring purses, pouches, bags and home decor. Each handmade piece is meticulously designed and assembled in my home studio using hand-dyed, hand-painted and printed natural fabrics or fabrics featuring my own designs printed by Spoonflower. My work also features genuine leather and quality hardware with materials sourced from USA manufacturers and vendors, benefitting small business whenever possible.
My Spoonflower Shop features an array of designs inspired by nature and modernism with a heavy dose of bohemian forms, reflecting my eclectic younger years growing up in San Fransisco in the 1970s and 80s. Every one of my designs you see on Spoonflower can be purchased on fabric, as well as wallpaper, bedding and home decor directly from the shop.
Consistently reflected in both my handmade and surface pattern work is my connection to nature through form, texture and fiber. Nothing opens my mind more to new ideas than a long walk in nature with stops to examine wild flowers or different leaf shapes on the trees around me. I’m also greatly inspired by traditional and modern embroidery and quilting, as well as knitting and crochet, thread art and paper crafts.
Though my mother and grandmother were both sewers throughout my childhood, it wasn’t until a college costume design class while I was studying stage management at St. Louis’s Webster University that I finally learned to use a sewing machine. I immediately fell in love with the meditative quality of sewing and continued to build my sewing skills after I changed paths to earn a degree in Art History at San Francisco State University. Now, more than 30 years later, I am still sewing and more recently began developing my drawing and digital art skills to create my own fabric designs.
A San Francisco native, I now live just north of the Golden Gate in San Rafael, California, with my husband, our dog Milo, our cat Louie, and sometimes one or both of our two college kids.
