Handmade cuteness for your closet
Made with Love by Hannah will outfit your entire wardrobe with the cutest little hand-screened textiles
By Lindsey Anderson
Published: August 18th, 2006 | 9:01pm
A few months ago, I ventured to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago spring fashion show. While I waited for the parade to begin, I opened the program and scanned the pages. In bio after bio I read the designers' inspirations: "Bovine anatomy," "nomad's tents," "behaviours and conduct of the Spanish inquisition." Intense.
So when I asked Hannah Kopacz, the self-titled owner, designer, printer, and seamstress behind the wickedly adorable madewithlovebyhannah.com, what her muse was, I braced myself for the inevitable deep explanation.
"I am most inspired by cute knickknacks, miniature golf courses, and old kitchen textiles like dish towel, apron and tablecloth prints,"she says.
What a relief. A designer with a sense of humor and fun.
Kopacz is the brains and brawn behind her own line of ingeniously printed skirts, tops, and other wearable items that seem to be massively impressing the 7,000 to 10,000 visitors a month to her Web site. "Gals seem to be quite happy with their goodies," Kopacz says. "I have a really high percentage of repeat customers."
And it's easy to see why. Kopacz's designs are a one-of-a-kind wardrobe experience that will tug on the heartstrings of hipsters and ladies who just want a little color in their everyday wears. From skirts in every hue that feature tree-top screen prints and "delightfully cute felt-friendly critter brooches," to nature-themed tops with frolicking gnomes and deer on top of ricrac trim, Made With Love by Hannah is an original find. As is Kopacz herself.
Kopacz started back in high school, where she learned the screen-printing process and also worked in a screen-printing shop. After realizing the higher ed calling just wasn't for her, she packed up and left her home state of Massachusetts for California and landed a job at Missy Clothing Company, where she worked for a steady seven years behind textile, graphic, and embroidery design desks. While she enjoyed designing pieces for herself at home, the process was long and a lot of work for only one garment, so Kopacz came up with an idea--put her designs on the Web and see what fish would bite.
After reading Teach Yourself HTML in 24 Hours (to which she says, "I did!"), Kopacz was up and running and the marathon hasn't stopped since. "Juggling time between working and starting a business until I could support myself with it was definitely the hardest part for me," she says. "I didn't sleep at all in that time." Kopacz said relief didn't come until she quit her full-time job and made her own line the focus of her energy and time, which has now bloomed into a 40-hour-a-week stint.
Everything Kopacz designs is made from scratch. Aside from the vintage fabrics used for certain pieces, Kopacz develops the artwork, dyes the fabrics, makes the screens, prints the fabrics, drafts and grades the patterns, cuts and sews, and tells me during all this, that her job is quite time consuming.
"I try to group similar tasks together to use time efficiently," she says. "I will spend one day just printing all day, one day just cutting orders, one day just sewing. But my work speed varies greatly with my mood. One week I will get so much stuff done, then another week will seem like I've been working constantly but finishing nothing. I don't know why. I guess everything evens out in the end."
And it does. Customers have expressed copious amounts of love for the Apple Pickin' Skirt and Schwarzwalder Skirt. "I don't really know what makes one thing more popular than another," Kopacz says. "I am just happy that people like the things as much as I do." Plus there's one more thing that might throw visitors for a happy-go-lucky loop on Kopacz's site--Made With Love by Grandma, a cutesy craft corner dedicated to Kopacz's boyfriend's mother, Socorro Rivero.
About five years ago, Kopacz met Rivero and Rivero started to show Kopacz all of her hand-crafted stuff, like knitted turtle-shaped pot holders and matching, his and hers panty pot-holders. Basically, they are totally sweet goods that you'll want to scoop up before they're sold out. (Seriously, four of Grandma's nine items are no longer available.)
So grab your credit card and put a dent in it. Visit madewithlovebyhannah.com.
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