A Minute With: Beth Tobey of Sweetnature Designs

The artist and designer creates handmade homeware and accessories, often inside her own house in Washington state.

A tandem bicycle pillow cover. Courtesy www.boxedonline.com

I live

in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington, with my husband and two kids - a boy and a girl.

Home means

comfort. I want to walk in the door each day and feel happy with what I see.

We have lived in our current home for 11 years and I have loved picking out paint colours, updating our furniture and rearranging our accessories. Decorating and redecorating is relaxing for me.

If I could change one thing about my home,

I would enlarge my studio or add a basement. Who knows what else I could create with all of that space?

I don't love

shopping so by using my own paintings and pillow designs I can reinvent our space as and when I feel like it.

I think our home is happy and colourful. Even my kitchen towels "decorate" my kitchen as functional art.

What I love most about where I live

is that we have the best of all worlds: the mountains and the water are just a car ride away. Our town of Snohomish has several small, eclectic shops, and Seattle has wonderful restaurants, museums and galleries, and colourful street corners perfect for people watching.

The rain makes everything lush and green, and when the sun is out there's no place that is more beautiful.

The most important designer of our time

is Steve Jobs. I'm not much of a technical person, but I love the iPhone and the iPad. These devices have changed lives for the better.

Right now

I am working on sorting through all of my ideas. I can't seem to turn off my creative thought process.

I am drawing some new designs for printing on pillows and aprons, and I want to design some simple wine totes.

Usually I decide to make something that I would like for myself and I needed a full chef-style apron, so there you are. My work is also client driven, so there are a few custom designs and products I am working on as well.

The easiest way

to jazz up a space is to add some colour, either on the walls with some fun paint or with some whimsical and unique pillow covers.

I like to add something in each room that is a bit unexpected, such as a small art object or an interesting painting or small chair; it can be a real conversation piece. In fact, I think a room looks best when some of the accessories don't match.

If I could design one thing that I haven't yet,

it would be larger textiles such as curtains, duvet covers and fabric by the yard. I am in the process of redecorating our master bedroom and I have ideas in my mind that I have yet to find. This is where a big basement studio would come in handy. My small studio space is perfect for my pillows and aprons but anything bigger wouldn't fit.

On my iPhone

you will find a whole range of songs, from Aerosmith and Duran Duran (I loved the 1980s) to Coldplay and Adele.

My kids share their songs with me and I love their suggestions. I love, love, love my radio app because I can listen to stations from all over the world while I am running. To be honest, most often I just pick my local National Public Radio station. But to know that I could pick any station is really exciting.

This year,

I want to add even more designs to my products, especially for my pillow covers since those are my most popular items. These new designs would also work for some new items I am hoping to add, such as wine totes, small zipper pouches, linen scarves and chef-style aprons.

I have a blog and a website and I would like to spend more time updating these for marketing and journaling purposes, but I enjoy the drawing, sewing and printing part of my business way too much to stop and simply type on the computer. I have to remind myself that I am a business person as well as an artist.

If I had to choose between form and function,

I would definitely choose function. I spent hours searching for the right fabric to make my kitchen towels and I have the perfect linen and cotton fabrics that work as well as they look. Believe me, there are lots of fabric choices I would love to use, but a kitchen towel must function as a towel first and foremost.

Design is important because

it can make a simple, useful object look nice. It is as simple as that. A towel or pillow cover is fine if it is a plain piece of fabric, but by adding a unique twist, it turns into something you will be happy to use and look at every day.

To buy Beth's products in the Middle East, visit www.boxedonline.com. Read her blog at sweetnaturedesigns.com