Smoking Lily and Gocco
Posted on Thursday, January 10, 2008
After pulling teeth with DHL our beautiful Smoking Lily package finally got into our hands and now we can pass the goods onto you. As mentioned in the last posts it includes some of their amazing silk teacozies, the Rowan Downa wrist bags, more of those super soft long sleeves you kids love so much ans some great new wallets.
For those of you from the west coast I needn’t explain the overwhelming popularity of Smoking Lily but here’s a little background for those of you thinking “Smoking who?”.
Smoking Lily was created by Trish and Julie in 1995. They were sharing a three-bedroom house in Victoria, BC and needed a third room-mate to cover the rent. Lily was invented and the spare room became a sewing and printing room. In the summer of 1995 they began selling printed silk scarves at an outdoor market. The prints of insects, flies, or antique chairs were a big hit and came to epitomize the Smoking Lily look. This repulsion/attraction aesthetic has become a recurring theme in their work. Trish and Julie decided they needed to rent a store on a miniscule budget. The store they found measures only 44 square feet.
In 2002, Smoking Lily opened a second (slightly larger) store at 3634 Main Street in Vancouver. Thanks to the wonderful neighbours and to Glenda’s management, Main and 21st is a great place to be.
Trish’s staff now includes Angelica, Nicole, Alex, Cara, Laura and Steph on the production front, Nora and Glenda helming the two Lily stores, and quite a few other brave and strong girls/women (featured regularly in the Weekly Updates) who contribute their energy and vision to Smoking Lily. Cutting, sewing, and silk screening are all done in-house. Julie has moved on to other endeavours.
(side note: this photo is of the Vancouver store on Main Street and the door just to the right was our old apartment, it’s a small crafty world)
Another fun announcement this week is that we recieved a Gocco printer from Felt Cafe in Japan and now we can do tons more printed items in store. I’ll add pictures soon of what we’ve done so far.
www.smokinglily.com
www.feltcafe.etsy.com