Designer-artist Judy Ross is known for her home textiles: pillows, Tibetan wool rugs, fabric, curtains, bedcovers and wall hangings. Now she is branching out with her new partnership with FineStationery, an online retailer of personalized stationery, holiday cards and wedding invites. Ross shares with EAL insights on translating textiles into stationery.

What are the challenges and benefits of designing for stationery versus textiles?
One of the the challenges that was there for me in designing the stationery versus textiles is that paper is a very flat surface and I could not use texture to add another dimension to my designs. My design work focuses on hand-embroidered textiles, and there is so much movement and texture in my artisans’ stitch work. This adds another dimension and a lot of texture to my designs. The only possibility of some texture in the stationery is when it is printed on a hand-made paper. But the benefit to printing the stationery is it is very immediate, and I can get very detailed in my line work and brushstrokes. I will be playing with that more in the future, with very painterly designs.

What were your inspirations for this collection? Does it reflect any of your existing textile work?
My inspiration for this first collection was taking some of my iconic designs and translating them into stationery. I wanted to pick some of the ones I love and then I chose colors that I thought best reflected those designs. So this first collection of stationery exists as [designs of] pillows or rugs from the Judy Ross Textiles collection. All my textile designs start out as sketches or paintings, so it was a natural progression to take that and translate it to stationery.