Aurora's Craftroom

We head to Pasadena in California to see Aurora Pringle's bright and colourful craftroom and studio.

"It’s so hard to choose my favourite thing about the room! Can we have a crazy plant-fueled MMA fight between all my favorites? Just kidding, I don’t want to be responsible for any knocked out teeth. Part of the reason we selected our place was because of the potential of the guest room as a craft area. I think my heart will always belong to good light. This room has it. Between a lovely window that lets in natural light with gusto, to the wall sconces, to the two lamps on my drafting tables, I’m covered. Covered in beautiful light. Like every person striving to get the proper amount of vitamin D should be."

Tell us about your space?

Pasadena, Ca, is where my craft room is, and it ain’t no joke! I’ve had craft spaces in many places (including a restroom floor in a house shared with other bananas gals), but in Pasadena, my craft room shares a city with the history of Albert Einstein, Sally Field, Julia Child, and Lance Ito. Perhaps my greatest accomplishment is managing to have a craft area in Pasadena. My craft room and I have been comfortably living in the City of Roses for two years.

Our craft room is a dedicated multi-purpose space, which is a fancy way of saying, “you can sleep in this room, but you’ll probably end up with glitter lodged in your belly button”. Our place was built in the 1920’s, and the rooms are small and adorable. We keep the guest bed in here, but since my girlfriends are usually the ones who stay over, we don’t worry too much about keeping things crazy tidy. These girls are warriors and could probably weather rattlesnakes. Multiple rattlesnakes. We do not have rattlesnakes in the craft room. There is a closet attached to the craft room, where my handsome husband keeps his wardrobe. It’s very handsome in there.

This is also my studio, so to speak, so you could say this is where the action happens. I do crafts occasionally, but I’m an illustrator and portraiture artist, so that’s what I typically do in this room. I like to lay out all of my pencils and pens on my drafting table, cut my paper, and then get to work. My drafting table usually remains a mess until the piece is totally finished. I usually count that amount of time by how many episodes of Gossip Girl I can get through.

What have you done to make your space cosy, beautiful or inspiring?

I’m a big believer in surrounding yourself with the things you love. In this way I am very much like Imelda Marcos. I love putting things my friends have worked on, up on my cork board. I like putting random finds up too—this can be anything from a print ad that has an amazing color scheme, or a piece by another artist that makes me think in a new, different way. I like being able to see what supplies I have to work with. Just seeing what I have around me can trigger uses for those things, and that gets me inspired.

How do you keep organized?

This is truly my Trojan Horse. I LOOK organized, and I strive to be organized, but I never truly in my soul feel organized. I try to have a place for everything. For the most part that works out, but there’s always about 25% of my stuff that is out on the basketball court making slam dunks and 3-pointers and getting injuries and Hall of Fame trophies. These things may never be contained, much like Dennis Rodman.

Any tips & tricks for organising supplies?
Be the Terminator of Stuff! Invite all your crafty friends over and tell them to bring their crafty supplies they don’t want. Trade up with them! Give all the extra stuff to someone who’s an elementary school teacher. I’m serious. If I don’t do this, I start turning into a woman who can’t open her overstuffed drawers. This is very inconvenient if you have a vision for something and are in the zone. You do not want to be in the position where you cannot open your drawers and you have a brilliant idea! Also: go to the thrift store and get tiny containers. Tiny containers are the best.

Which are your favourite possessions and are there any of your own creations on display?

My favorite possession is probably my drafting table. Tied for that would be one of my fine point black ink pens. I feel like they work hand in hand, with my own literal hands. I don’t have any of my own work on display, but I do keep a huge whiteboard full of my goals over my drawing area. So I sort of created that.

How do you organise your inspiration and ideas?

I’m actually pretty old school. I love to print things out and actually buy certain magazines each month. I have loads of notebooks that I have filled with clippings and drawings. My second greatest achievement (second only to having my craft room in Pasadena) is that I once filled a notebook with clippings of interviews, photos, and articles about my number one muse, Drew Barrymore, from ages 12-26. All of my notebooks since that one pale in comparison. I also use the internet like a cataloguing freak—you can find me on Pinterest and Tumblr. That’s where I put all my found inspiration from the internet.

Where do you look for inspiration?

If I’m running low on inspiration, then I probably haven’t been reading or socializing with my friends. So I’ll usually hit my neighborhood bookstore Vroman’s and get cozy for a few hours in the stacks, or I’ll email my girlfriends to get together and discuss what they are working on, what they’re into, what they’re obsessing on. I have been known to get into intense research mode, where I find something I like, and then I trace their influences, and then THEIR influences, like a less adorable version of the first Back to the Future movie. I only say less adorable, because Michael J. Fox was so adorable. SO SO CUTE!

If you had three wishes, what would you do to make it the dream space?

1. Shelves…shelves to the very top of high heaven! The potential of so many shelves makes me both giddy and afraid—I could put so much stuff up around the room…and also, I would accumulate so much stuff. Nobody said a wish had to be a good idea, that’s for sure.

2. My second wish would be to have a full time chef from my favorite sushi restaurant, Shojin, on duty, because I do love healthy snacks while I’m working my tookus off.

3. And my third wish would be to have Blair Waldorf on call as a real life friend (I would set up a special 1950’s vintage gold phone that would be a direct line to her place in New York), to motivate me to always look at the big picture, stick to what I want, and to tell me about her schemes when I need to laugh.

Make sure to check out Aurora's artwork on her website »