Sewing professionally with MaricorMaricar.

With clients like Wired, Vogue, TOMS Shoes and Esquire. It’s not a surprise MaricorMaricar won a grant from the British Council in Australia to work and live in the UK. Getting their big break in 2012 when they were selected as Art Directors Club Young Guns.

We spoke to the girls about embroidery and graphics. How they make their ideas happen, what makes them tick and why they got into the creative field in the first place. Here’s what they said…

Why embroidery? What excites you about it?

We appreciate the slow process of building up a graphic stitch by stitch. And the ability to layer colour and play with texture through embroidery.

Give us an idea of your average day, how you work and how do you get your creative ideas done?

Because each day can be quite different. Mornings are taken up by responding to emails and doing any urgent admin.

The rest of the day is a combination of design and drawing if there’s a new brief to start on. Otherwise it’s heads down sewing for the day. Sometimes through the night with regular tea breaks.

We try to have a proper lunch away from the desk, where working from home comes in handy.

We’re spoiled being able to watch a bit of TV with lunch.

Actually we sometime watch TV/movies while sewing to help us focus. Our mind tends to wander when embroidering a large piece, so having background noise stops us from checking our laptops every 5 minutes.

How do you attract new work?

We try to keep our social media networks up to date. Twitter, Instagram and Behance have been really beneficial.

Also, we try to work on personal pieces. That allow us to experiment with new techniques which often gets referenced by future clients. We try to take part in a few exhibitions each year to give us this opportunity for play and experimentation.

How long have you been doing what you are doing and would you say it’s your career?

We’ve only started taking embroidery as a full time profession seriously within the last few years. We’ve been doing it full-time for about 4 years.

What advice would you give to someone starting out in illustration?

There are so many ways to approach it.

Thinking back, we came to it in a round-about way. We’re not sure if we made things harder for ourselves or came to it by sheer damn luck.

Whichever way you decide to pursue illustration, prepare for your fair share of rejection.

If you believe this is what you are meant to do, you have to learn how to bounce back. You need to be quite stubborn and not shy away from promoting yourself.

And always be on the look out for opportunities, or make your own.

Self initiated projects really helped us get our name out at the start. They are still invaluable now in helping us to develop and stay fresh.