About me and Nadja Wedin design

My name is Nadja Wedin, I am now in my golden middle age, with a partner and three lovely children, two grown ups and one almost a teenager. Not to forget our five cats. I was born and raised and still live in Farsta, a suburb of Swedish capital Stockholm. I received my artistic education at the Art School in Stockholm and at Birkagården Folk High School.

The years at the art schools have been some of the best years of my life, when I got to learn everything from color theory to pattern design, all in a creating and allowing environment together with people who loved to create as much as I did.

After the education I partly worked as an illustrator for a few years, but now I run my own business together with my partner. Pattern design has been my main thing to do, and besides creating for my own brand I have created a number of collections for other companies, amongst them the largest chain in Sweden for interior textile design, Hemtex.

How it all started

It all started with a drawing, and a comment from a friend: "that would be nice as fabric!" And still, this is usually how a pattern comes about: I draw freely and try not to set rules for myself, but get away with lots of details and colors. Sometimes it's just a bunch of lines from a black felt-tip pen and sometimes there are a lot of colors to mix. My work process is time consuming because I draw with many details. A single drawing can take up to 80 hours to complete. But in the meantime, the pattern often takes shape inside my head, and the next step is to pick out the goodies from the drawing and put them together into an interesting pattern.

I use to compare the creation of patterns with the work of a choir leader. Each and every individual voice in a choir is important. They all have to sing in tune. But it is only when the choir leader manages to get all the individual voices to perform together in harmony, sometimes strong and loud, sometimes whispering and weak, that you get the full choral work. The pattern has to sing in the same way. I can spend hours moving a detail in the repeat, only some millimeters, or changing the tone of a color, just to get the right harmony.