The story behind our Australiana blanket
Of all the blankets we make, the Australiana is the one people buy most. It's also the one that nearly broke me.
A painting, not a drawing
Most of our designs start life on a computer. The Australiana didn't. We asked an artist to paint a set of Australian animals and plants by hand, the old-fashioned way, on paper. Koalas, kangaroos, an echidna, a platypus, and a whole lot of native flowers and gum leaves to tie it together.
When the paintings arrived, they were beautiful. They were also, from a practical point of view, a problem.
Getting a painting onto a blanket
A blanket design needs every animal and flower as its own separate piece, with a clean edge, so they can be moved around the pattern. A painting is all one piece, on textured paper, with soft edges and little bits of paint where they shouldn't be.
So every single element had to be scanned at high resolution, then carefully cut out by hand, edge by edge, so it could sit on a clean background without a halo of paper around it. If you've ever tried to cut out a koala's fluffy ear in Photoshop, you'll understand why this took a while.
Laying it out
Once everything was cut out, I laid it out in Illustrator like all our designs. One side is a repeating pattern of the animals and flowers, with the child's name scattered through it. The other side is a feature layout, with the bigger paintings arranged around the name in large lettering.
The trick with this one was keeping it feeling like a painting rather than stickers on a page. The little flowers and leaves do a lot of work there.
Why people love it
We think it's a few things. It's unmistakably Aussie without being touristy. It works for boys and girls. And it makes a great gift to send to family overseas, or for an Australian baby born somewhere else, as a little reminder of home.
See it up close
You can see the Australiana blanket here, or browse our other Australian baby gifts, including the Great Barrier Reef inspired Vibrant Ocean and Sunflower Dreams.
