Today, we are very excited to share a Q&A with Tammy Lawrence and Sarah Edmonds of Banquet Atelier & Workshop. The team creates quality goods that celebrate the the natural world. We love their beautiful cards, notebooks, and prints. Read on, for our interview...

What's your daily bookmark routine?

There are a few sites we keep coming back to. Pinterest – We just started our own Pinterest page and it is seriously helpful to have everything in one place with its source. It is also terribly addictive! Keep Feeling Fascination – Joanna of Kneeland and Co. has the best job in the world. She travels the world collecting amazing textiles, jewelry and ephemera that designers can troll for inspiration. She’s an archivist, creative director, and artist all rolled into one. Closet Visit – Jeana Sohn personifies the concept that women dress for other women. She has shared some of the best clothing collections we have seen, and we admit we’ve borrowed more than one idea here for our own wardrobes! Even Cleveland – We are long time readers of this inspiring site. Stephanie makes us feel like we are enrolled in the very best master’s class exploring art, poetry, music and fashion. We learn something every time we visit.

What drew you to blogging?

In the beginning it was a way to track the things that were inspiring to us on a much more personal level, but as Banquet has evolved so has the blog and we’ve had to adjust our content to meet our readership. It’s pretty amazing to have a forum to share the things that are exciting to us, and while Lygia Clark or our passion for succulents might never get translated into a print or note card, it articulates the layering that is integral to our creative process. It’s also been a great way to connect with an international creative community.

What designer, artisan, or product are you currently obsessed with?

Mina Perhonen, is a Japanese label that does it right. Great prints and quirky silhouettes, it’s a Japanese vision of Scandinavia, particularly Finland. Illustrator Brian Wildsmith’s children’s books constantly blow our minds. He has the most amazing sense of colour, and the personalities of his animals fly off the page at you. We both grew up with his books, and truly never tire of his work. When we were last in New York, we spent a long time in the shop A Détacher, coveting everything in sight. The designer, Mona Kowalska, has a great eye for antique pieces and estate jewelry, which matched with her fabulous collection makes a world we want to be a part of (Sarah did manage to stalk a pink and grey sgraffito print sweater online until it was hers). These are the pieces you will wear your whole life. And of course, Sister Corita. Anyone who has heard of her has to be inspired. An ex-nun who was a pacifist and political and used art as her weapon? What’s not to love? Tammy and her two-year-old recently attended a Sister Corita inspired print making workshop for children at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. The day ended with a marching band. Perfection.

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What posts do your readers love?

Anytime we post photos of what we are working on we seem to get a great response. I think we are a part of such a loyal community that people want to know what we are up to and support us. And anything vintage, especially for kids. Children’s books, antique pieces from our friend Belle Heir, and to this day one of our very first posts, vintage baby lederhosen, is a runaway hit!

How hard is it to separate your real life from your blog?

It is not as much of an issue anymore. The “Sarah and Tammy” of Banquet and the “Sarah and Tammy” that do the milk run and pick up the kids from school are definitely different. But we wont pretend there aren’t times that a blogging narrative permeates the motions of our day! But we’ve learned to step back and try and be present. It’s not always easy to disengage, and sometimes we don’t need to, but parenting can teach you to compartmentalize for the better.

How did you get involved in print making/design?

Sarah has always been an artist and studied textiles when she first went to university. She grew up in a creative household always sewing or drawing or writing and an unavoidable obsession with books started early.

Tammy has always managed to surround herself with artists and musicians in work and life. More of a dabbler in design she leaves that hard stuff to Sarah! As a refuge of the television industry, she always knew that she would end up working in a creative business.

What are some of your greatest sources of inspiration?

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• We love vintage science and nature books for kids, like the small Golden Nature Guides, and color plates in old encyclopedias.

• Our friend and artist Julie Morstad captures the imagination of children in a truly beautiful way. Her children’s books are read over and over again in our homes.

• Our children’s Montessori preschool. A place of beauty that looks out on a city park, we want to stay and play with all the beautiful wooden toys and puzzles, and even after 100 years Maria Montessori’s ideas about childhood and education make a lot of sense to us.

• The way our kids see the world is a constant source of inspiration–from animal obsessions to costume changes, Lego and block building to songs sung on a ukulele, we are always learning and laughing.

• One constant inspiration for us is traditional textile work that perhaps at one point served very utilitarian purposes, and is today admired and respected. Some of the discoveries we return to again and again include Gee’s Bend quilts, early cross stitch samplers, Gunta Stozl, and Japanese boro.

One of our inspiration boards.

What is your workspace like?

We each work in different places in our homes. Sarah operates visually and is constantly collecting imagery and ephemera that is pinned to the wall, tucked into the files, pasted into sketchbooks, or filed away in her brain.

Tammy works all over her home: in bed, on the couch, on the dining room table, much to her husband’s dismay!

What are your most treasured possessions?

Art from friends and family. Passionate collectors, we both have work from people we love and admire all over our homes.

Loved for its huge garden and great light, Tammy’s home is a refuge but also a beloved gathering place among the family of friends she and her husband have made for themselves in Vancouver. Also her husband’s great great grandmother’s wedding ring, a simple gold band given on their anniversary as a surprise.

Sarah has been getting a lot of wear out of said A Détacher sweater, and a hand made model ship built by Tammy’s husband takes pride of place in her living room. She also has a mini library of sketchbooks, preferring the smooth white pages of the French Claire Fontaine books. Each book not only tracks inspiration and is a great design resource but also a record the day to day of her family.

Tammy's husband's hand made model ship.

If you weren’t taking designing and blogging, what would you like to be doing?

We LOVE what we are doing with Banquet Atelier & Workshop. It is a natural extension of our past lives and incorporates elements of what we have both always wanted to do. Some days though, we imagine lives as party planners, painters, interior designers, and food or travel writers as being much more fun and lucrative!

Our journals filled with sketches and future plans.

Any future plans you can tell us about­?

We are really excited about the team behind us. An example of this is our new Christmas cards. We love them! We work with a small local printer, and they do an outstanding job. It’s such a pleasure to work with craftspeople who are truly artists in what they do, and they’ve really played a mentoring role with us as well. It’s these kinds of relationships that make us excited about what we are doing and where we are going with Banquet.

Next year we are hoping to launch a small line of textiles. We are in the early development stages, and really enjoying the research and the challenge of translating our designs into this tactile medium.

Holiday cards available on our website.