Behind the Design Wednesdays: Every week Tea writes about our designers’ inspiration for our current collection of clothing. Explore all of our Behind the Design posts.
You may be wondering, why does Tea have a frog and a monkey on their baby romper? Well these two creatures actually represent two famous married Mexican artists, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
If you’ve been following our Studio T blog, you’ll know that a lot of our Modern Mexico children’s clothes collection was inspired by the works of Diego and Frida. Our La Rana Y El Mono baby romper captures our playful tribute to them.
frog drawings and mosaics by Diego Rivera, monkeys from Frida Kahlo’s self portraits
Diego thought he looked like a frog and Frida would often paint monkeys throughout her work. The artists started to use the Spanish pet names La Rana (frog) and El Mono (monkey) for each other. We think that’s pretty adorable.
How about you? What are your pet names for your loved ones?
Yesterday we let you know the behind the design story of the alebrijes hiding on Tea’s graphic tees. Today we want you to let your imagination wander and help us create the alebrijes of your dreams.
Color in the alebrijes below and post it in the blog post comments section or post it on our Facebook! We want to see all the fun colors you can dream up for this coyote and pony alebrije!
Download your activity printout here: Alebrije Coyote or Albrije Pony.
Behind the Design Wednesdays: Every week Tea writes about our designers’ inspiration for our current collection of clothing. Explore all of our Behind the Design posts.
Mexican artists continually represent the creatures of their imaginations in alebrijes, which are brightly-colored sculptures of fantastical creatures. We saw alebrijes throughout our Mexico trip; some were small enough to fit in the size of our palm while others spanned the length of the street!
Our Modern Mexico children’s clothes line is filled with our interpretations of alebrijes. Check out these ones hiding out in style on our graphic tees!
Which alebrijes Tea creation is your favorite? Check back tomorrow for a fun children’s alebrijes cultural activity printout.
Explore all of our graphic tee options for girls and boys.
Mexico is filled with wonderful creatures- such as the Jaguar which inspired our Jaguar Mask Boys Tee and the Monarch Butterfly which inspired our Butterfly Girls shirt. At Tea, we want to bring our designs to life- literally! Download the masks below and have fun watching your child color their character mask and then transform into either a fierce jaguar or a playful butterfly!
We want in on the fun. Post a picture of your child wearing the finished mask in our comments section below.
Árbol del Tule images from here & here & here
We visited Árbol del Tule on our Mexico inspiration trip. This tree is so impressive you can’t capture it in just one photo, hence the photo collage. The trunk has a 38 foot diameter! That is larger than California’s famous giant sequoias.
Árbol del Tule is often referred to as the “tree of life,” because of all the many ‘creatures’ you can find hiding in its gnarled trunk. We decided to hide some of own creatures and objects in our Arbol Del Tule activity pages, can you find them all?
download full resolution activity pages here below:
images from Tea’s Inspiration Trip Photos
While traveling through Mexico we saw a variety of interpretations of the Tree of Life theme, which inspired some of our designs for this season.
The woven rugs pictured above feature the Zapotec Tree of Life and inspired our Árbol de la Vida Tee.
The top right image is a ceramic tile, a modern interpretation of the Tree of Life that inspired our Little Citizen PJs. We hid quite a few creatures in our tree design. How many can you find? Check back tomorrow for our “Tree of Life” activity page you can download and enjoy with your kids.
The remaining images are a style of Mexican clay sculpture known as Tree of Life. These traditionally have biblical themes (middle right image), but modern interpretations can be pretty much anything, like the day of the dead tree on the bottom.
Tea’s Little Citizen PJs and Árbol de la Vida Tee, with accompanying inspiration.
Behind the Design Wednesdays: Every week Tea writes about our designers’ inspiration for our current collection of clothing. For more Behind the Designs click here.
Have you checked out our pinterest boards yet? We’ve been collecting Mexican Kitch artwork as inspiration for our current collection. There are tons of amazing interpretations of day of the dead skulls, check it out!
Our Piñata Stripe Party Dress and all our fun striped dresses were inspired by all the great woven blankets we saw on our inspiration trip.
Behind the Design Wednesdays: Every week Tea writes about our designers’ inspiration for our current collection of clothing. For more Behind the Designs click here.
In honor of Dia de los Muertos next week check out this awesome skull someone painted on a tree trunk. This is actually just outside of Studio T, I saw it around the corner on my way to our local art store.
Friday we share a weekly behind-the-scenes photo taken in our offices at Tea. This could be anything – great employee outfits, our sources of inspiration, shots from our parties, or photos of us hard at work. For more sneak peeks behind the scenes at Tea click here.
I saw this shirt in a shop in Seattle with some friends last weekend. They were joking and asking what “62″ had to do with Mexico, not actually expecting a response. I told them that there were more than 62 languages spoken in Mexico and they were rather impressed I had an interesting answer. They wanted to know where they could go to learn that kind of information about our designs. I told them to stop being bad friends and read my blog posts!
People often ask me how long it takes to design a graphic. There is no straight forward answer for this. Some graphics take days. This one is one of those serendipitous graphics that took about 5 minutes and just worked. Our designers happened to take a picture of hand painted house number “26″ during the Mexico inspiration trip. We loved the numbers and the concrete created a perfect texture. All I had to do was swap the order of the numbers and done!
Behind the Design Wednesdays: Every week Tea writes about our designers’ inspiration for our current collection of clothing. For more Behind the Designs click here.