Featured Etsy Shop Raumalainen

Featured Etsy shop this week is Raumalainen: Gift items made with hand painted fabrics, appliqué and embroidery, hand printed cards and much more. Please have a look! RAUMALAINEN Hello, my name is Liubov Leray. I live in Rauma/Finland since April this year. After we’ve felt ourselves a bit settled here by the end of spring, I’ve started a blog and then launched a shop on Etsy at the mid-sommer. I named them both Raumalainen, because that is how I refer to the principal source of what inspires me – it’s all about my surroundings at the moment – my family, the house I live in, the nature around me, people I meet and what I think and how I feel about being here – it’s all here, it’s all in Rauma, inspired, designed and hand made in Rauma, it’s all raumalainen now. I have several creative paths that I’m exploring now : textile accessories, hand printed stationery, stuffed toys (knitted teddy bears), drawings (mixed technique and ink), art for children. I share peeks of what I’m doing on my blog. Textile accessories and hand prints are now listed on Etsy.  I love quick projects that can be finished within a couple of days/couple of evenings and usually start working immediately after I’ve sketched the basic idea of the composition. Ideas come from my flower drawings, printing experiments, walks with my family, where I collect or sketch anything that catches my eye – leaves, seashells, feathers, bark pieces, everything that I incorporate later in my designs, whether for fabric pieces, of for cards, or just as colour study for later. The most important foundation of any project is a satisfying composition and how the colours and textures relate to each other – sometimes I like it tempered, sometimes with more contrast, it may be about warm colours, or may not, maybe neutral, greyish or bold and vivid. It’s all about the feeling of the moment. That’s why I try to work quick and finish in a little while – otherwise the feeling gets lost and it’s not that authentic any more. Once the idea is put on paper and I have found the basic value relations, I play around with different materials as long as I’m satisfied with the match, then sew all together and it’s done!  I have a three year-old daughter and she gives me lots of inspiration. Firstly because we do a lot together – painting, drawing, texting, making collages. Talking to her and answering her questions, making little ‘zines makes me see things from another perspective. Many of my current (yet-not-for-sale) projects, like colouring sheets with short stories, are inspired from these moments.  I find inspiration nearly everywhere - flea markets, yard sales, travelling, fabric stores, museums of applied arts, museums of fine arts, fine art galeries, art fairs, handicraft shops, my garden, nature in general, art books, children books, secondhand bookstores, fashion, fashion photo, cards, everyday objects. I believe that everything and anything is meaningful, and opens an opportunity to learn, to acquire knowledge and wisdom, both successes and failures. Our move to countryside (first France, then Finland) was for me the best to get the inspiration reconnected with practice. Being in a big city was like constantly having too much creative input and losing myself in endless possibilites. Countryside has cleared my mind and got my hands doing stuff. I’ve started my Etsy-shop in July, and now I’d like to focus a bit more on promoting my work beyond Etsy and participate in handicraft fairs, going meeting people and showing my works. At the moment, it’s nice having a market place online to be able to refer to it, when talking to other people. But I would be happy to show my designs more in real and find contacts to shops so that people can get better in touch with what I do. It’s difficult to choose a favourite item, because I simply love all of them. Each piece is something special for me, it reflects lots of inspiration, hard but joyful design work and lots of pleasure seeing it taking shape and becoming a visible, usable and independent object.   I’m not planning anything in particular. I follow the feeling of the moment, and go with the creative flow of thoughts, dreams. I may suddenly be inspired and start a whole new project within one single day. If I’m pleased with the result I’ll share it, even if it feels a bit outsider to what I usually do – I feel myself like I’m still searching what my creative path can be. My point is to be true about what I’m doing and what I put out there, I’m not following any prescriptions besides of what I feel I need to make here and now – to create pieces that represent what is important for me in this or that moment of my life and what I’d like to create and share – in one form or another. So right now I just follow my inspirations and try to work as much as I can, coming up with new ideas, sewing, drawing, painting, photo shooting, blogging about it. www.raumalainen.blogspot.com