WALK EVERYWHERE.

Good indian girls do design!, was founded in 1994. I started out doing a few handmade cards for friends, then I began selling at Boise's local farmers & artisan market. My first sales were encouraging and I liked what I did. Word spread and I began to get custom orders and requests for handmade invitations. Soon I was designing beautiful, custom wedding invitations and greeting cards for clients all over the world. This little studio now produces hand silk-screened greeting cards, wedding invitations and other little goodies. We're working on introducing a few other items such as pins and t-shirts and handbags featuring our exotic designs. As a printmaker, I am fascinated with new and unique ways to get images onto paper & other surfaces, so I experiment a lot. I have a "thing" for paper, color, simple graphics, all things design and botany (my first love). I'm inspired by Indian clothing, grocery stores, little hang tags on clothing, and store design. The name "good indian girls" is a phrase taken from a great movie, Monsoon Wedding by Mira Nair. The idea behind it is ancient, we Indian Girls are always trying to please our parents, mine wanted me to be a doctor...the rest is history.

What it takes to create handscreened cards... The word serigraph was formed from the Latin seri (silk) and the Greek graphos (to draw). A serigraph is a print created utilizing the silkscreen process. A silkscreen is a frame with silk or other fine meshed fabric stretched tightly across it. An image is created directly on the fabric screen using a stencil to form the image and to block the areas where paint is not needed. A hand-screened serigraph is created when the artist themselves applies the ink to the substrate, using a hand-pulled squeegee, and removes it from the printing table manually.

Each card design is drawn by hand and these original drawings are scanned then printed onto a transparency (this is the first positive). The transparencies are laid out onto handmade frames stretched with monofilament silk coated with a light sensitive medium. The images are "light burned" for an hour, then the non-cured medium is washed out creating a negative where the color will transfer through. Ink is squeegeed through the screen, creating the final positive image onto the paper - this is done once for each color, one card at a time. It is a time consuming process, and it is also my passion. I use a non-toxic printmaking method incorporating tinted water-based paints. My studio houses a library of each season's designs - dozens of frames line up on a wall of shelves along with the paints, squeegees and papers from around the world. I hope you enjoy the exquisite designs of each individual card! As always, no trees were harmed in the making of our cards. We use tree-free cotton or 100% recycled papers.