My Real-life Big Beach Build

DIY Network star Marnie Oursler takes on colossal coastal projects- this time, on her own!

Our handmade Betsy Ross flag was featured in her home.

Pretty in Print

How Saratoga’s Betsy Olmsted Channels The Whimsy Of Nature Into Her Original, Vibrant Textiles

Written by Rosie Case

It’s hard not to be charmed by Betsy Olmsted’s contagious brand of laughter. When I catch up with the Saratoga Springs-based textile designer to chat about her eponymous line of exuberant watercolor offerings, I ask her if her surroundings have influenced her work. “I’m living in a town with a lot of nature,” she says. “I’ll take my work into the city and people will be, like, ‘Oh, a squirrel! I saw a squirrel in the park the other day!’” She giggles over her words. “Depending on where you’re coming from, nature is more of a big deal.”

What definitely is a big deal is that every piece Olmsted makes is an original work of art. From pillows to towels to wallpaper, she first hand paints all of her designs on paper, and then reproduces them with a special, inky dye that mimics the original with vibrant, sophisticated results. I scroll through her Instagram feed as we chat, and even a color-phobe like myself can’t help but be drawn in, in particular, by her luxe Pink Shibori pillow. And her take on wildlife is just as compelling: She cites Congress Park’s architecture and formality as the inspiration for her ethereal Swans Pillow.

I’m also kind of obsessed that the Skidmore College graduate gets to work out of her home studio, which is a converted horse stable, naturally. So when the workday’s through, where does this mom head out with the family for a bite—or with the girls, for a cocktail? “The Mouzon House is so charming, with great Creole food—and I love a good night at Desperate Annie’s!” Hey, you know what they say: You can take the girl out of Skidmore, but you can’t take Skidmore out of the girl.

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A One-of-a-Kind Christmas in Upstate New York

A staid holiday house this is not! Think tie-dye instead of plaid and fuchsia rather than red. HGTV Magazine takes you inside.

The House

When it comes to holiday decorating, Betsy Olmsted doesn’t just hang a simple wreath above the fireplace — she finds one made of funky vintage ornaments. She doesn’t just put up a traditional Douglas fir — she dresses a glittery gold tree and caps it off with a homemade hot pink star. The textile designer, known for her hand-painted woodland scenes in neon colors, prides herself on decking the halls in a way that’s as unique as her Saratoga Springs, NY, home.

When she and her husband, Peter, first toured the converted 1890 carriage house, they fell for the way it married farmhouse charm with a modern layout. Plus all the walls were already painted a crisp white — the perfect backdrop to help Betsy’s spunky decorating style stand out. During the holidays, it makes her wildly festive touches all the more striking. As she puts it, “Christmas around here looks quirky and fun, just the way we like it.”

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A World Of Whimsy & Watercolor

Written by Mary Cirincione

Skidmore alum Betsy Olmsted in making fabric fun with her original hand-painted designs.

For mom-of-two Betsy Olmsted, color is more than just an accent—it’s the backbone of each of her designs. Her watercolors lend wow-factor to blank textiles, resulting in incredibly vivid tea towels, table runners and aprons, even scarves and pillows. Every item in her namesake line bears an original watercolor design imagined, then executed, by Betsy herself. We’re talking cheeky squirrels, foxes, swans and hedgehogs, as well as feathers, florals and pineapples. There are horses, too, for her fellow Saratogians.

Her distinctive wares are available online via her website and at boutiques and retailers across the country. She has been featured in everything from HGTV Magazine to House Beautiful, as well as on Design Sponge and Apartment Therapy. Locally, you can snag some of her top sellers at Red Wolf and the National Museum of Racing.

In your own words, how would you describe yourself and what you do?

There’s something about seeing your artwork put on a textile that seems magical. But I have always loved textiles and fabrics—always. I don’t really know exactly where that came from, but when I was at Skidmore I did a semester abroad in India. The whole idea of auspicious color—there’s color everywhere—I do think influenced how I use color in my work.

Plus, there’s really a huge history to textiles. The idea of cloth, the idea of how to color that cloth and what it’s meant to different cultures and societies, is incredible to me. But the way I’m doing it, it’s definitely a modern, cutting-edge way. Every dye I use is fiber-reactive, and the machines look like wide-format printers connected to tubes of dye. Then the textiles are steamed and washed so they’re really colorfast.

Tell us about how you got started. Are you self-taught or professionally-trained?

I was an art major at Skidmore and from there I worked with architects, and then went to grad school at Philly Textile, part of Philadelphia University, for textile print design. That’s where I had formal old-school training. We had to become experts in dyes and pigments and the way they react to certain fibers and how printing is done. But when I first got there, it was kind of like “What, I have to paint?” but I just started using my painting skills to work out this old way of doing textiles.

Tell us about your process.

As things evolved into my own company, it’s really been watercolors and gouaches that have pushed me to where I am now. Everything I do is produced digitally which is why I’m able to do what I do. I can produce small scale items, one-offs and can produce a big range of color. I can get millions of colors in one design, whereas traditionally if it’s screen-printed it’s usually 18 colors or less.

With watercolors, it’s reverse layering where you start with light colors and work in dark colors, so there’s no highlight adding. I love the way watercolors are reproduced on fabric, because it looks like it’s hand painted.

I have to tell people that painting for a frame is very different than painting for textiles. I can paint different pieces of my design on different pieces of paper or scraps, and I can move it around, change the colors, get rid of pencil lines and tweak it to make it work [digitally]. People want to see them but really, they’re just piles of paper, and if I mess up and drip a blob, I can fix it [in the digital design].

But like I said, this is not a precious, fine art situation. You can be really loose with it so it’s fun. I work out a lot of the composition later, once I get all of the elements painted and I like the way they look. As far as the printing, I don’t print anything on site because I don’t have the equipment for it.

What inspires you, in terms of your craft?

I’ve always enjoyed nature and that’s really what my customers want from me, although I’ve also tried geometrics and some other stuff. But really, they come to me for this sophisticated, whimsical animal and nature story because that’s what everybody likes the best.  It works because I love animals—I don’t know what it is about them but they just make me laugh.

I also look to previous decades for design ideas all the time, like I’ve been painting a lot of mushrooms lately and feathers. It’s kind of like the ’70s have arrived again which is great.

Has Saratoga always been home?

My husband and I both went to Skidmore and got married in Saratoga, but we lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania for 13 years.  About one-and-a-half years ago, he got a job in Albany and we moved back to Saratoga and it was like, of all the places we were going to have to move, it’s a great place. We’re downtown in a converted carriage house with attached horse stables, which turned into my studio. Each bay serves a different function—there are three—and they’re all connected but separate, so I can close myself off from all of the daily responsibilities. I can close myself off and go into this other world which is what I try to do every day.

What do you like most about Saratoga Springs, and/or the region?

We love that Saratoga is so densely packed with everything we need — provision shopping, entertainment, museums, bars, restaurants, parks and theaters. We rarely need to leave. Also, we appreciate the philanthropic vibe and the community’s support for arts, history, architecture, and culture. Saratoga is a melting pot of transplants and native Saratogians all bringing the vibrant downtown to life.

What’s next for you and your business?

We are gearing up for the holiday season while at the same time designing the spring collection. We are also preparing for an open studio and textile sale for sometime in November or early December. We’ve got a new turkey design for Thanksgiving, with a turkey runner, turkey tea towels and Christmas stockings which are all completely new. It’s a little strange gearing up for holiday when you’re in the middle of summer, but that’s how it works.

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Meet Betsy Olmsted

Written by Megin Potter

A perky forest floor is enlivened by animals jauntily scattered across the scene as if caught by surprise. A sunny string of colored feathers float back and forth. A vibrant close-up view of a moth’s wing is a sea of mystery as it unabashedly stares. These are the images spread across Betsy Olmsted’s pillows. Her cheerful designs also brighten tea towels, tabletop fabrics and wallpapers, among others. They are a peek into an enchanted natural world made in the center of the city. Here, the reindeer are rose-colored, the owls and goats; touched by tints of green. “At heart, I’m an artist and that’s where this all came from,” said Olmsted.

WIDE OPEN SPACES The Betsy Olmsted Design Studio is located in a renovated horse stable attached to a carriage house in downtown Saratoga Springs. Built in the 1890s, the space was converted by the home’s previous owner and the interior design reinvention work completed by the Phinney Design Group. The open floor layout features bright white walls and rustic wooden beams as the backdrop to Olmsted’s mid-century furniture and radiant pops of color everywhere. “This color sense I have, came from when I studied in India. I like bright, crazy, fake color. There, the landscape is very brown and the people wear very bright colors,” she said. After studying fiber arts and ceramics at Skidmore College, Olmsted graduated in 2002 and worked for an architectural design firm before attending graduate school at Philadelphia University. She moved back to Saratoga Springs in 2016, where she lives with her husband Peter, two sons; Emmett and Wells, and two dogs, Winnie, 13 and Hank, 2. It’s a busy life where making art doesn’t wait for inspiration to strike. “I have to do it whenever I can,” said Olmsted. From her studio, she can keep an eye on what’s happening around her, invite her boys in to color and create (without worry) on the concrete floors, or duck behind the dividers to focus on production. The sliding barn doors and the original iron lattice horse bay partitions separate the work space into distinct sections. The dye kitchen is Olmsted’s chemistry lab, where she experiments with pigments and inks. The second stall is where she paints her quirky watercolor designs and uses her computer to digitally prepare them for print. In the final section, a wall of finished fabrics is stacked, ready for shipping. “In the studio, things can get very messy. It feels like this space was made for me in a way. It divides things up nicely. It’s all about function and flow,” she said.

CHANCE VENTURES In addition to creating a great product, taking care of a million little things a day is what has built up the Betsy Olmsted brand into one that has been featured on HGTV, in Country Living magazine and has resulted in multiple collaborations, wholesale and licensing deals. “It’s a big, huge, time-consuming thing that takes time away from being able to paint,” said Olmsted. Some of her most fortuitous business opportunities however, have happened by chance. Just after Olmsted moved back to Saratoga Springs, she met Virginia Fretto, owner and designer of Razimus Jewelry, at the school where their children both attend. “She said to me, ‘I think I’m using your fabric for my jewelry’. That was like instant friendship,” said Olmsted. At trade fairs she met a representative of Windham Fabrics (a textile producer of fine quality quilting and sewing fabrics that she now designs for) and was approached by an acquisitions editor to write her own book.

LIMITLESS POTENTIAL Olmsted’s book, Hand-printing Studio: 15 Projects to Color Your Life – a visual guide to printing on almost anything, was released in 2016. “It was a great way for me to share all the education I’ve had. It encourages people to loosen up,” she said. Behind the scenes, the book’s stylized photo shoot was completed in a chaotic mess of ink, piles of samples, and with a dog that insisted on chewing up the block prints, she said. It was a process that mimics Olmsted’s overall design philosophy, based on the straightforward advice from her former Philadelphia University professor, Hitoshi Ujiie: everything isn’t so precious, just paint and paint a lot, despite criticism, because within all that production, there just may be a gem to be found. “I see things objectively and judge them based on if they look good, not based on what I feel. I’m very thick-skinned about it. A constant barrage of criticism is part of the process to getting it right,” said Olmsted. Betsy Olmsted and Razimus Jewelry’s Virginia Fretto will both be at the Country Living Fair in Rhinebeck, on the Dutchess County Fairgrounds, June 1st to 3rd, from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. daily. Olmsted will also be hosting a book signing and workshop there at 3 p.m. on Sunday.

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A Victorian Carriage House And Barn Become A Home And Studio For a Textile Designer And Her Family

Written by Rebekah Carey

Betsy and Peter Olmsted share their home with their two boys Emmett (7) and Wells (4), as well as Winnie the mature-madam shepherd mix, Hank the French bulldog, and Archer the leopard gecko. Their home was originally a Victorian carriage house and barn that was used for three neighboring mansions, built in 1890 when it also had three deeds. The 5,400-square-foot home was created from the converted spaces in 2008, and the Olmsted family moved in and made it their own a year ago. The downstairs features an open plan, their den, and the attached stables that became The Betsy Olmsted Design Studio — Betsy’s namesake textile company, Betsy Olmsted, which features a line of printed vibrant watercolor infused textile housewares with her whimsically sophisticated illustrations (which are heavily inspired by animals and nature). Upstairs you’ll find more open spaces, three bedrooms and baths, a study, and even a screened-in sleeping porch.

Betsy and Peter have kept close to their love story, literally: they met in college, married in Saratoga Springs, NY, and now their home is just down the street from their alma mater. The family was planning to relocate to be closer to Peter’s job and had one weekend to find their house; coming back to their college hometown was a happy byproduct. Despite the varying styles of homes they toured, Peter and Betsy knew the moment they stepped into their now home that it was “the one.” Betsy had actually always wanted to live in a barn, and loved how open the spaces were. The fact that it was somehow an in-town barn made walking to restaurants and shops incredibly convenient, it had a space for an on-site design studio as well — it was the perfect fit.

While the bones of the home were heavenly (while sitting in the living room you can look up and see all the way through the cupola) the style felt a little more like a lodge than a home. So, the timbers and doors and windows were all painted white (Benjamin Moore “Linen White”), in a terrifying process using plywood sheets and ladders to reach the some 40 feet up. Iron balusters were updated with steel cable and tempered glass. In Betsy’s studio, she took the dark green former stables and painted everything white and added casements under the window to allow for more natural light in the somewhat cave-like space. The last vestige of the lodge feel for Betsy and Peter is their fireplace, and because of the scale, it will take a while for them to figure out what the perfect replacement will be. While the open spaces were something Betsy had dreamed of, and one of her favorite features, they do create the design challenge of being able to see everything from one end of the house to the other. Betsy had to make sure when she was designing the space that everything felt cohesive. Scale is also a key design element in their home — pieces that once felt huge in their last home were now dwarfed in the massive barn house.

Creating a space that was colorful, informal, incorporated furniture inherited from Betsy’s grandparents (traditional on one side and mid-century from the other), and that could handle two wild boys, was essential. Betsy is most thankful for the former stables that became her studio, originally thinking that she would have to rent a studio before they found their home. Betsy explains, “The feeling of old time past and rustic white wood are so brand-friendly. It’s a luxury to work while the boys are home and at night without leaving the house. I also bring them into the studio to make projects like tie dying and painting. Plus I like for them to be exposed daily to my work and to art and design — I hope to inspire them.” She also never takes the open space for granted, especially during the long winters. Betsy adds, “They run around, build obstacle courses, and shoot Nerf bullets all over the place. It really helps keep them ‘out of my bubble’ and I can see everything they’re doing while cooking, etc.”

The Olmsted family has no shortage of interests and activities they like to partake in; for Betsy it’s design and art, gardening (their neighborhood allows for supporting local farms and produce, too), yoga, and scoring vintage finds. Peter’s work is in energy policy and he is an advocate for sustainable energy and enjoys cycling and outdoor adventuring. Their seven-year-old, Emmett, loves nature (especially rocks and fossils at the moment) and animals. Last but not least, Wells loves track suits, costumes and his favorite gold high-tops. We can only imagine how much fun this family will have creating art and memories together in this inspiring space.

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Work of Art

The Textiles of Betsy Olmsted

by Crystal Schreffler 

“I always am looking for and seeing color!” says Betsy Olmsted.

Collecting curiosities while outdoors remains a fond childhood memory for Olmsted, who recalls having always loved animals and nature. Today, those memories form the impetus of her thriving technicolor textile company that endeavors to deliver whimsical, yet functional, art designs to accessorize fashion and homes.

With items like scarves, pillows and tea towels, Olmsted's designs allure beholders with her surging colors springing from the fabric. “I am usually drawn to ‘off’ colors and stay away from basic primaries,” says Olmsted. Since starting her self-named company in 2011, she has been using an “organic and intuitive approach towards color” and subsequently gaining much success from her keen style.

Working with such clients as Anthropologie, West Elm and Land of Nod, Olmsted originally sought to start her own company to balance her work with being a mother; “I always had the desire to start my own company and be my own boss,” -she says. Starting her business allows her the flexibility to spend time with her two boys, Emmett, 6, and Wells, 3.  

An online deal with Anthropologie “really pushed the textile printing and production,” leading the business to be listed as an LLC. Working with such large companies was really exciting for a new artist and her burgeoning company, but the deal with Land of Nod remains her favorite. “They carry my woodland mural and used huge-sized animals from the design in their storefront windows when the mural first became available,” says Olmsted.

What really sets Olmsted’s unique designs apart is the illusion of handpainted watercolor on fabric, which is, in fact, her goal. “I sketch and plan the imagery, then paint in watercolor and gouache,” she explains. (Gouache is an opaque watercolor that can be applied in solid colors.) Finished pieces are then scanned to create a digital file that can be used to apply the designs to any textile, creating the desired appearance of a handpainted look with a longer-lasting quality.

After the morning chaos that ensues with getting two children dressed, ready and off to school, Olmsted returns to her studio. Ideally every artist would love to create all day, but as a booming business owner, Olmsted also adds “correspondence, invoicing, shipping and product development” to her day. “I always look forward to when I have time to paint and create new designs,” she exclaims.

Having earned her bachelors degree in fine arts from Skidmore College and a masters in textile design from Philadelphia University, Olmsted says her passion for art developed in her teens. Now, with a successful art and textile collection, her latest endeavor has been developing a book which comes out this month. Sparked by a serendipitous encounter at an exhibit for Country Living Fair in 2014, a collaboration with a publishing editor began. Following the suggestion to use a photographer from Pennsylvania and to shoot the book locally (Lancaster and Wrightsville) as well, Olmsted worked with Sara Code-Kroll of Growing Tree Photography (www.growingtreephotography.com), and the wheels were set in motion.

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Written by Lauren Debellis

Artisan Betsy Olmsted has introduced a line of zodiac prints to her tea towel collection. Each towel is adorned with the symbol associated with each sign of the zodiac.

Olmsted’s line of towels feature digital prints of her original artwork, which she creates using watercolors and/or gouache ink. While Olmsted has her designs digitally printed in India, the towels are then cut, sewn and finished in her Lancaster, PA-based studio.

Olmsted recently spoke GOURMET INSIDER® at the NY NOW market. She explained that her 100% cotton towels are designed to be both functional and decorative, as customers often hang them as artwork in their homes.

Each tea towel measures 13.5″ x 23″ and has twill hanging loops.

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