Designer’s Sketchbook: Lynda from little odd forest

I’m so excited to be sharing a brand new feature with you. Called Designer’s Sketchbook, I will be inviting indie designers to share pages from their sketchbooks.  Back when I was working on my own jewelry line, I carried my schetchbook with me everywhere and regularly sketched ideas as I had them. I loved coming up with a design, seeing it on paper, sourcing materials and finally being able to create the finished product.

I was looking through some of my old sketchbooks a couple of weeks ago (you can see a page from one of mine below) and I got to thinking about whether other designers use sketchbooks in their design process. Well, I put out a call to designers and I got a great response from designers who say that yes, sketches are the 1st step to bringing a design to fruition for them.

I thought you might be interested in this as well, so I invited a few designers to submit pages from their sketchbooks along with images of their finished products.

The first featured designer is Singapore based Lynda Lye from Little Odd Forest. Lynda earned her Bachelors in Fine Arts degree (BFA) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and started her indie lifestyle brand, Little Odd Forest in 2004. She designs and creates magically enchanted accessories, homewares, tees, plush, paper goods & more.

The above page from Lynda’s sketchbook features several designs including the Scallop Bag. I just love the fairytale inspired bag designs she creates!

Lynda also shared some of her sketches for her Stump Cushion,  Hedgehog pouches and her Tree Trunk Coasters among others.

Here are some more finished goodies!  Love those Hoot Bags! Lynda creates her goods in her home studio as well as with help from full-time and part-time sewers in Singapore and the Philippines, where she set up a sweatshop-free workshops and living spaces for otherwise jobless and/or homeless, poverty-stricken women.

Lynda doesn’t have any fixed creative regime, but instead has more of a free-flow process of sketching ideas and inspirations, doodling, making changes, hunting for supplies & fabrics, more sketch changes, finalizing drafts on her computer & doing up prototypes before coming up with finished products. Finished goodies like the adorable baby booties Lynda is working on above.

I hope you like this new feature, because I had so much fun putting it together and I will be featuring more designers & their sketches in the upcoming weeks.