RUBY STAR SOCIETY
ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA
A lifelong artist, Melody Miller decided to trade in her corporate job for the world of design after the birth of her second child. “We had recently moved, and I couldn’t find any curtains I liked,” she recalls. Undaunted by the fact that she didn’t know how to sew, Melody designed curtains and hired someone else to sew them— until her seamstress suddenly disappeared.
“I emergency-found someone on Craigslist to give me a sewing lesson and ended up hiring her to just sew the curtains...While I was practicing and trying to get better at curtains, I started sewing these little animal shapes just to do something more interesting,” she says. Melody turned the animal shapes into tooth cushions and put them on her Etsy shop. DailyCandy picked them up, and they sold like hotcakes. “I got a herniated disk from all the sewing that I was doing!”
“I decided I needed to rethink my strategy—not be a one-person sweatshop,” Melody explains. Having a baby, she grew interested in baby bedding and “really began looking at fabric for the first time.” She fell in love with Japanese prints from Kokka, but, unclear on the rules about using a designer’s fabric in manufacturing, Melody decided to design her own.
She first discovered Quilt Market through Kim Kight’s blog, True Up. “It was one of the first on my radar,” she says. “I went to Market in 2009 with a portfolio [and] met a few manufacturers.” Kokka offered her a contract.
Melody generally draws her designs directly in Photoshop or Procreate. “Usually I give myself a little talk about how I’m going to go with something subdued and sophisticated,” she says. “And then it’s always the wildest, craziest, most complicated of everyone. I don’t know why! Somehow I need to complete a two-thousand-piece puzzle every time I make a piece of art: lots of color, lots of layers, lots of textures.”
One of Melody’s biggest challenges stems from being on a delivery schedule that calls for major collections at least twice a year. “Sometimes it feels like your brain isn’t ready even though the calendar is,” she says.
Something that really helped was my personal one-hundred-day challenge in 2019. Initially, I created the challenge to draw a flower every day as a way to better learn Procreate without putting any pressure on myself to do great work or incorporate the drawings into my fabric designs. I just wanted to build a new skill and give myself plenty of time for progress. After about a month, I started to see a style develop. Over time,
I was able to find my voice in this new medium, and suddenly I had lots of new art for my fabric designs.
As creative director for Ruby Star Society, Melody thrives on collaborating and working directly with individual artists on contemporary fabric design. “They submit their work, and then I see an opportunity to adjust or tighten something up or pull it together a little more. I love that part of the process where you just see this magic happen, where the collection really gets polished at the end.”
Having founded Cotton+Steel in 2013 and then Ruby Star Society in 2018, Melody has observed a natural progression in her self-perception: “I noticed that I’m starting to think of myself as an independent artist again, instead of my identity being completely about the brand. That’s been a nice development.”
