Designer Profiles

Each day is an adventure for Cathie Filian, the creative force who produces and hosts the television shows Creative Juice, Witch Crafts and the forthcoming Makeology on HGTV and the DIY Network.

Cathie publishes books, sews, crafts, designs clothing and accessories, paints, appliqués, cooks, and even gardens. She and Steve Piacenza are national spokespersons for Plaid Enterprises, where they contribute original design, recipe, and home décor ideas. They also contribute to an eye-popping number of periodicals, radio and internet podcasts, and blogs.

Her secret to making creativity a lifestyle is seven-fold: like what you do, don’t care if someone else likes it or not, vow to make a lot of mistakes and learn from them, realize there’s more than one way to do something, look at possibilities instead of what isn’t there, be brave enough to take risks, and tune out naysayers.   “Most important,” she adds, “is to simply start.”

Dye-Hard At A Young Age

Cathie was immersed in creative endeavors at a tender age when growing up in the Midwest. “At seven, I had my first Rit tie-dye birthday party,” she remembers, “So Rit Dye has been part of what I do for most of my life now.”

She began to sew and make her own clothing when she was eight, and worked at a fabric store in high school. “I learned the basics and branched out from there. And I appreciated how convenient it was to find Rit at the grocery store,” she recalls. “Its quality and affordability made it so easy for me to experiment, and proved that you don’t need a lot of supplies to be creative.”

In college at Ohio State University, she studied art history and fashion design, and garnered an Outstanding Senior Design Award, which she parlayed into a career in film and theater costume design. On the sets of films such as Heartbreakers, Rushmore and Vanilla Sky, she would use Rit to craft clothing for the set, and for herself as well. The cast and crew would often ask her where she found her unique jewelry, purses and clothing -- which is how she knew she was on to something great.

For film work, she would custom-mix her own colors. “You can’t film bright white,” she explains, “So I would use a half teaspoon of liquid Tan and Pearl Grey to dull white clothing for the camera. I literally went through hundreds of boxes of Pearl Grey.”

From Behind The Camera to Camera-Ready

After a decade, she grew tired of the film business and the 17-hour workdays. She jokes, “I wanted to get out of the business, so I jumped back in five years ago with my own TV show."

Cathie saw a need for a broad-based arts and crafts show that would interest both beginning and advanced crafters, so she created a 17-minute pilot with $3,000 from friends. The show, Creative Juice, was purchased by the DIY Network within a month, and then its sister station HGTV purchased 104 episodes, along with numerous spin-offs.

To render her success all the sweeter, she was celebrating her wedding in Capistrano, CA (which was easier for her Midwestern family to navigate than her hometown, Los Angeles) when she received the happy news that her TV show was green-lit. So in one fell swoop and memorable weekend, she celebrated a wedding and TV show amongst her loved ones.

Since then Cathie, Steve Piacenza and their partner Greg Byers have been nominated for Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lifestyle Hosts for Creative Juice and for Outstanding Lifestyle Program for their work on the show Witch Crafts.

Immersed in Colorful Ventures for Craft Junkies

In addition to Cathie’s book, 101 Snappy Fashions: Oodles of One-Piece Designs for Babies, she’s also published Creative Juice – 45 Re-Crafting Projects and Bow Wow WOW! – Fetching Costumes for Your Fabulous Dog, all through Lark Books, available at Amazon.com. She and Steve also pen DIY Hobbies, a syndicated newspaper column, and regularly update their blog, as well as contribute to numerous magazines.

Cathie will soon debut a new crafts & sewing TV show called Makeology. The show’s core audience will be moms with children between the ages of 6 and 10 years, and the show’s premise is to inspire children and their mothers with core knowledge of arts and crafts basics -- which could then spark a life-long love of creating beautiful objects and clothing.

For inspiration and to relax, she visits thrift shops, gardens, bakes, travels, and goes to the movies. Sometimes she’ll watch a movie and her previous job will come to the fore. She’ll think, “Hmm - I really like that character’s sweater.”

Cathie was also featured on Oprah.com in a Dove Beauty interview, and speaks at conferences for entrepreneurs and creative ventures. Her Etsy shop opened in November of 2007 and is full of useful and unique craft items, and her blog is a rich source of crafts inspiration.

Cathie and Steve, in conjunction with Plaid Enterprises, have also launched the sale of Hot Glue Gun Helpers: pink & black tools designed to prevent hot glue gun burns, which mercifully include a mat, finger cap, tweezers, and press wand.

How does she manage to keep her life organized? With foam core boards as calendars, of course, which she can carry from kitchen to craft room or wherever when on the phone. “I need a large-scale calendar,” she laughs, “A Blackberry just won’t cut it.” It’s precisely this sort of ingenuity that fuels Cathie Filian’s success.  “Every day brings something new,” she marvels, “You really never know what will cross your path.”

Vaughan Alexander: The Mind Behind Verlaine

Fashion designer Vaughan Alexander describes his career, with whimsical understatement, as “a rather roundabout journey.” His first stop on a planned “world tour” at age 20 eventually led to a decade in Tokyo as a costume designer for iconic Japanese pop stars, including the diva of the ‘90s shibuya-kei movement, singer Maki Nomiya of the Pizzicato Five.

Eventually tiring of the fast-paced music scene, Vaughan left Tokyo and spent years roaming the world doing a range of design jobs, “from the sublime to the ridiculous.” Most recently, he’s settled into the position of Creative Director of a small-but-growing high-fashion label dubbed Verlaine. A far cry from the eye-catching color bursts of Japanese pop culture, Verlaine’s hand-tailored, organic shapes and muted palette were soon embraced by chic Soho boutiques. This fall, the new Verlaine collection debuts during New York’s fabled Fashion Week.

Delighting in Dye

“Dye has probably been the one thread of continuity in my life,” Vaughan laughs as he directs his staff of assistants with waves of his dye-stained hands. “I love the dependability, the ye olde quality of Rit Dye. I can honestly tell you that I’ve used this stuff since I was seven years old.”

Fueled by a lifelong passion for color and fabric — but with absolutely no formal training in clothing design — Vaughan’s method is a deft combination of self-taught technique and hands-on experimentation. “Making clothes isn’t rocket science,” he says. “You can learn all the basics from books. Then, if you can see the human body and know what you want to create around it — if you’ve got that kind of brain — somehow it all works out.

“I’m quite fetishistic about color. And that’s why I love Rit. I love how easy it is to blend Rit colors. They mix in a really logical way.  And the process of dyeing is quite transformative; heat can have brilliant and unexpected results if you treat it as an added tool. Often, I prefer to start with white or natural-colored fabric and dye it myself. Otherwise, it’s unlikely that I’m ever going to achieve the particular shade of chartreuse that I can see inside my brain.”

Scottish Plaid Meets Japanese Shibori

A prime example of his method is in Verlaine’s new line, where brushed cotton plaids have been overdyed to achieve some startlingly original textural effects. “I started with the most bog standard plaid you can imagine, mostly red, then overdyed the fabric with Japanese shibori techniques, using stitching to resist the dye in certain places. I used a weak solution of black so the red still comes through.

“I’m a bit of a mad chemist, actually. The new season has crazed amounts of multi-process colors. I love the way natural fibers change when you boil them in dye multiple times — each time shrinking them a bit, watching them change in color and texture. And you end up with some brilliant finishes, almost by mistake.”

The aesthetic of “creative control fused with happy accident” is key to Verlaine’s new line, and to Vaughan’s design philosophy. “I think the million-dollar question in any realm of design is, when is it finished? You have to know when to stop. Sometimes what you’re doing requires ridiculous embellishment. But other times it requires elegant restraint and a clean line and a sharp proportion.”

Distressed Beauty, Beautiful Decay

Once a Verlaine garment finds its buyer, Vaughan wants it to keep evolving. “I don’t like clothes that are precious. I love clothing that changes over time and becomes an integral part of you. I’m very intrigued by the process of destruction and decay. A lot of my clothes are designed to look like they’ve already had a life, like they’ve been through something. I imagine that the woman will take my jacket off and toss it on the floor at the end of her bed. Then she’ll pick it up in the morning and put it right back on. And slowly, over time, the pleats will hang a bit differently, the stitching will loosen a trifle, the colors may fade and change a bit — but the jacket will become all the more beautiful because it reflects the life of the woman wearing it.”

Vaughan’s commitment to nature is another reason he uses Rit. He doesn’t want to be plunging his hands into harsh chemicals, and the dyes work well with natural fibers, which is all he uses for the Verlaine line. “I won’t have so much as a polyester label in my clothes,” he says. “I can’t bear it.”

Runway to Subway

Verlaine’s fall show is scheduled for the cavernous space of the fashionable Metropolitan Pavilion, but his dreams include some slightly more dramatic venues. “If I had it my way,” he laughs, “I’d do my next show in a disused subway station, and make people crawl through a manhole to see it!” And what does he envision for the future of Verlaine? “You have to hope that you make clothes that, in some way, capture the zeitgeist. Clothes that women love and want to wear. That’s really the beginning and the end of it.

“I’m actually pretty old-fashioned,” he concludes. “I believe in the work and the craft. There’s so much empty stuff in the world right now. Stuff that is really successful and has no soul. But I’m trying to make clothes that are beautifully crafted, that have love in them. I want to see the hand stitching. I want to know that a human being was involved in this, and that the human being really loved doing it. If you put love into the things you do, it must resonate on some level.”

He catches himself waxing philosophical, and laughs uproariously. “Oh, I’m such a hippy! Don’t tell anyone I’m a secret hippy!”

When Rit Dye recruited mixed media textile artist Judy Coates Perez to help formulate the hundreds of recipes in our new ColoRit Color Formula Guide, she approached the task – as she has so many other things in her varied art and design career – as a pleasant opportunity to experiment. "The fact is," she says, "I had never used Rit before. I'm a bit of a dye snob, and I'd always used professional fiber-reactive dyes in my work. But I'm also very playful. I don't like limits. I do a lot of mixed media things – taking teabags and slapping them on quilts, combining fabric and paper and drawing and painting on them. I'm willing to try anything, and I'm always on the lookout for new materials that will work easily for specific needs."

Like Mother, Like Daughter

So Judy sat down with her daughter Nina – another mixed-media artist who's been "making imagery from the moment she could grip a pencil" – and went to work. Or rather, play. "We just pored over the Pantone color book and targeted every color that we thought people might want to use," says Nina. "We worked our way through the color wheel, dyeing all different sorts of combinations, trying to come up with as many different recipes as possible."

"From the existing product line," says Judy, "we conjured hundreds of variations, everything from delicate pastels to extremely bright and saturated colors. Ultimately, I gained a lot of respect for what Rit can do. It's incredibly fast compared to using other types of dyes. You can get results pretty much instantly, within just a couple of minutes. You mix the dye, throw it in the microwave, bingo, you rinse it out and you know what you've got. You don't have to wait four hours or more. So it's really good for experimentation.