Janet Carlson Digitizes Hand-Rendered Textile Designs

Janet Carlson, a Miami-based artist, presents a collection of digitized textile designs rooted in her lifelong creative journey. Her earliest memories involve hand-stitching with felt fabric provided by her mother, and she later crafted costumes for troll dolls. Encouraged by her mother and grandmothers, Carlson pursued a fashion design degree after a five-year gap due to a denied student loan in 1973. She worked in small family businesses and spent 25 years in Miami's garment industry, including seven years at Tops N Tops as a Missy designer. Her responsibilities included purchasing textiles and advising on marketable selections. As manufacturing shifted overseas, Carlson worked with Haiti, Guatemala, and Bangladesh as a pattern maker and technical designer. After Miami jobs disappeared, she studied Adobe Suite at vocational school and Pattern Observer Textile Design Lab, creating her first print designs in Illustrator. She marketed men's board shorts at local craft shows, handling sublimation printing, pattern making, grading, cutting, and sewing 42 pairs in her garage. Her style evolved through practice, collaging, and quilting, with admiration for Gustav Klimt inspiring gold embellishments. Carlson now offers her hand-rendered digitized textile designs to the commercial marketplace with exclusive rights.