Annie Bossert is a mixed media artist who is specialized in custom furniture design; she grew up on a farm in central Illinois where her love for stripes also born as she lived with rows of rows of corn and soybeans. She started her career as a furniture maker where she used plywood to express her interest in stripes by cutting different angles into the plywood to make different striping effects. Anne indirectly got into woodworking through working with textiles; she loved to mix different ways to combine her textiles and woodworking while working in her shop in Fort Collins, CO.

Recently Anne is designing and building all of the studio furniture pictured on her website; she is a fiber artist and a woodworker mixed up into one person. Her designs are original but she is quite inspired by mid-twentieth century furniture and industrial design.

This article is a little description about Anne’s recent work “The Whimsical Furniture” and some details about her life, work and inspiration etc.

Little about the start of Anne’s interest in designing:

In her words, her mom inspired her to be interested in strips from her childhood when her mom gave her some clothes and told her to sew them. It was her first introduction to the world of textiles as well as the concept of making hr won designs. This mindset led her to join a furniture making class where she made her first work, storage for CDs than a plastic milk crate. Besides taking classes on woodworking, she also developed her knitting and weaving skills to make more designs on wood. After a few years, she joined in a job in a sign shop where she had to fabricate signs that helped to better understandings of tools and making.

Little about her furniture design:

She is a fond of functional art and loves to assemble all the careful curation of the objects with surrounded objects to make them more interesting and beautiful. She always tries to challenge people’s expectations about the look of furniture with their mood; in her works, she mess with their perceptions on views and then she dyes and weaves stripes into the textiles that are the same width as the stripes of the laminations in her used plywood. When the striped fabric is mixed into a piece of striped plywood and both dyed in the same color than the mind blowing furniture comes out.

Her ways to communicate design intent to customers:

Anne does a lot of commissioned pieces so she has to ensure that her customers have a solid understanding of what they will be getting. Whenever she makes something which is hand dyed or hand woven fabric, she makes a custom material in SketchUp; she at first simply scan a sample of her fabric and paint into her SketchUp model for maximum realism. According to her, SketchUp helps her to make simple designs wonderful through easy used tools.