COTTON & FLAX
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, USA
Erin Dollar’s life changed forever halfway through her junior year at the University of California at Santa Cruz. As she describes it, she “stumbled into the printmaking department and completely fell in love.” As a fine art major, Erin had been honing her sense of design, color, and line, but printmaking captured her “type A, rigorous, analytical side.” It was the intersection of scientific thinking—of chemistry and meticulous process—and her artistic style.
Erin graduated in 2008, at the beginning of the recession, and moved back to her home city of Portland, Oregon. She patched together a living working at odd jobs and joined a cooperative printmaking studio housed in a repurposed storage unit, next to the dumpsters in an alley behind a pizza place. In that less-than-glamorous workspace she shared with twenty other artists, Erin found her people—a community of artists who “all had the same weird, shared, very specific interest that was basically a foreign language to everyone else [she] knew.”
Erin focused on making art prints on paper and began to print on fabric. She brought “textile experiment pieces” to art sales and sold them on Etsy, where they received a very positive reception. Cotton & Flax made its online debut in 2010. “Then it just overtook my life,” laughs Erin. For the first two years, Erin hand printed each piece of fabric at the cooperative studio; sewed finished products; and packaged, labeled, and shipped them from her apartment by herself.
Cotton & Flax expanded when Erin moved to Los Angeles in 2012, found a larger studio space, and connected with sewing collectives to help with production for her growing wholesale business. She launched two collections of products a year with new prints, patterns, and colors and increased her product line from pillows and tea towels to include items such as coasters, napkins, table runners, and lavender sachets.
Erin’s work for Cotton & Flax is unified by her single-color designs, printed only in black or white ink on brightly colored base fabric.
When I launched the business, a restricted palette was a way for me to save money on ink, because I only had to buy two colors to create a really diverse product line. I could buy ten different colors of fabric but only make one silk screen. What started as a practical necessity has become my signature style.
The essential elements of Erin’s printed patterns are clean, simplified forms, shapes, and lines, often inspired by her sketches: “I try to do some sketching in new places...Something lights up in my creative brain when I’m in front of a new thing.” Erin creates drawings for patterns from her collected sketches using rich, black Japanese sumi ink and brushes or pens on smooth Bristol or watercolor paper. She scans the designs into Photoshop or Illustrator to refine them.
“Modern fabric has very clean design—it’s a little bit more minimal. It’s sophisticated. Something about it is just a little bit crisper, cleaner.”
Erin centers her design process for Cotton & Flax products around the materials: “I named the business, literally, for the fabric: beautiful linen fabrics or cotton/linen blends. I allow the textures and colors of the base fabrics to inform the pattern that I create.”
Fabric considerations also led Erin to collaborate with Robert Kaufman Fabrics beginning in 2016. One of her major concerns is “how to offer affordable pieces to as many people as possible without compromising my aesthetics or my ethics in manufacturing,” Erin says. She had been using Robert Kaufman Essex linen/cotton as a base cloth for products since the early days of Cotton & Flax. “I knew what a beautiful fabric it was, and there was demand, because people were asking me for yardage. ‘Can you sell me pieces? Little offcuts?’” Erin pitched her ideas to the Los Angeles–based fabric company. The design team, familiar with Erin’s work, collaborated with her to develop colorways but used only her signature black and white ink.
Arroyo, a forty-four-piece collection inspired by the light and textures of the Southern California landscape, was released in 2017. Balboa, Erin’s second collection of prints on Kaufman’s Essex linen/ cotton, was released in 2018. The second line celebrates the beautifully imperfect nature of the handmade by featuring pattern motifs that echo Anni Albers’s weaving, sashiko mending techniques, traditional woven basket designs, and spools of thread. Warm neutrals and rich reds and blues with bright green and aqua evoke Erin’s adopted home city of San Diego.
Shortly after moving from Los Angeles to San Diego in 2017, Erin was forced to stop hand printing because of a back injury:
I’ve had to really step back from the manufacturing parts of my business...I’m trying to think about it in a positive way, but it still makes me sad. Printing is the joy of my life. But the reality is that... I needed to become the leader of the company; I really need to be focused on the higher-level creative aspects.
The opportunity to lease a retail space came while Erin was transitioning away from the production and manufacturing side of Cotton & Flax. Erin’s brightly lit shop and studio allows her to host small workshops focused on block printing and pattern design. “I get so much joy from teaching because it’s kind of rekindling those early memories of connecting with printmaking when I was in college,” Erin says. “I’m getting to rediscover the media through the eyes of my students.” She also shares the processes used to create designs for Cotton & Flax online. Erin says her students “design their own fabric [and] print it, and then they have made something that’s completely unique, completely handmade...It’s empowering.”
