Not For Squares

I’ve men­tioned tex­tile designer Stephanie Miles (who owns and runs Smiles Design) on a pre­vi­ous post as I fell in love with her hand­made black and white wooden bird­cage cards.

Stephanie emailed me yes­ter­day to say she has now launched Bower­bird, her new ven­ture to spe­cific­ally sell her cards and jewellery.

Cur­rently Bower­bird designs are only sold via the online mar­ket­place Not On The High Street.

The reason for the name? Appar­ently Stephanie is fas­cin­ated with the little Vogelkop Bower­bird, a nat­ive of New Guinea, who are so named because of the beau­ti­ful shel­ters or ‘bowers’ they build.

Stephanie says she’s a bit like a Bower­bird “a bit plain, but likes dec­or­at­ive things and col­ours”. The Bower­birds dec­or­ate their shel­ters with incred­ible detail that show a nat­ural eye for attract­ive design. Some use col­our­ful flowers and leaves, some col­lect stones or other objects, which they lay out in patterns.

For any­one inter­ested in learn­ing more about the Bower­bird, here’s a clip from BBC One’s nature pro­gramme Life…

The Vogelkop Bower­bird. Nar­rated by David Attenborough.

Stephanie has many more designs up her sleeve so keep an eye on her Not On The High Street shop.

I get very excited when I meet other cre­at­ive folk and par­tic­u­larly when they’re local to Coulson Macleod. If we lived in Lon­don we’d expect to meet like-minded design­ers all the time. But we’re not in Lon­don. So I have the pleas­ure of intro­du­cing a brand new busi­ness, Smiles Design, owned by Stephanie Miles, a freel­ance tex­tile designer. Stephanie makes the quir­ki­est neck­laces I’ve seen for awhile and I can see them being big news.

I’m abso­lutely lov­ing this bird­cage neck­lace (£20)…

I also love love love her cards (£5.95), which remind me of Rob Ryan…

Stephanie’s busi­ness is so new that she doesn’t even have a web­site yet, but if you’d like to place an order then you can con­tact her at smiles.uk7 @ mac​.com