“Ya Living”

“Ya Living”

Photo credit: courtesy of Carole Feld

“I used to be a lawyer,” said Lisa Bittan, “but I stopped that about 20 years ago.  After my son went to boarding school, I wanted to do something different. Since I always loved fabric and handmade paper, I went to India because we used to travel a lot together and our sort of grand finale trip before he left for school was India. I just fell in love with what they make there.”

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Photo credit: courtesy of Lisa Bittan

Lisa is the founder of Ya Living based in southern California. She travels the globe to seek out and work with gifted artisans and designers who create beautiful textiles and crafts by using traditional methods of dying, weaving, printing, and embroidery. Together they adapt ancient techniques to create products for contemporary tastes and use. Ya Living’s collection seeks to support and celebrate the beauty and spirit of individual hand-made creation, and offer timeless objects of beauty which connect us with the greater world.

To be hosted at the home of Carole Feld and David Levy, former President and Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (and musician who has played with Joni Mitchell) and current head of Cambridge Information Group’s educational division which includes Sotheby’s Institute of Art, was a perfect fit.  Their home itself is a work of art.  Feld is a former Vice President of PBS and Marketing Exec at Tri-Star Pictures and currently a branding consultant.

Carole Feld and Liz Wilson 1

Carole Feld and Liz Wilson toast Bittan with Blackwell Rum

Blackwell Rum is the brainchild of international music icon, entrepreneur and cultural pioineer Chris Blackwell who with his music label Island Records brought the best of Jamaican reggae and rock music to the world. Now he has collaborated with his son Chris Blackwell, Jr. and renowned advertising guru Richard Kirshenbaum to bring you the finest rum made from Jamaican sugar cane and distilled by Jamaican workers. Chris hails from one of its oldest merchant families, the Lindo family, who first came to Jamaica in 1625. His grandfather owned J. Wray & Nephew—renowned for distilling the best rum on the island. Chris continues in the family tradition with the introduction of Blackwell Fine Jamaican Rum, developed from his own recipe. We like having friends that know distillers, so thank you Mr. Blackwell……….

Carole Feld Lisa Bittan Lauren Cafritz

Carole Feld, Lisa Bittan and Lauren Cafritz

“I liked being a lawyer,” she told Hollywood on the Potomac, “but I wanted to do something different, start over basically.  I’ve been doing it for the last 8 years and I work in villages in India. I base myself most of the time in Rajasthan and work in little villages outside with people who continue to make things by hand the same way they’ve done it for hundreds of years.  Actually, when I tell a lot of women this story, so many women have had this love for fabric and also paper their entire lives, either collected it or just appreciated it.”

Anita Ensor.

Anita Ensor

“I try to wear my designs most of the time,” noted Bittan.  “The clothing part of it is more for warmer weather, resort – people call it bohemian chic but I make also all kinds of things for home and gift that are more year round.  In India they’ve been doing these sort of things for a long, long time and you go and pick out colors and prints. I do more hand block printing than anything else. You just work with them and figure out what will work that you like and work becomes a joint project.  They hand loom it and just basically that. They set the loom and the yarns are dyed a certain color and that’s what happens.”

Chaffee

Amy Lehrman, Izette Folger and Kevin Chaffee

So, where can we get her designs?  “I’ve sold a lot on One Kings Lane and a lot of other websites like that.  I was on the Today Show. They’re in little boutiques, mostly in California, Southern and Northern California and also some in New York. They’re not large productions, so when you deal with larger department stores, they want multiples of things, and just by the nature of what I do, that’s not really possible. They don’t repeat, repeat, repeat. It’s all mostly hand. There’s not 100% similarity, so it’s harder for larger stores to carry them,” she told us.

Lisa Bittan

Photo credit: courtesy of One Kings Lane

Bob Heggestad and Valerie Strauss

Bob Heggestad and Valerie-Strauss

Ok, so we had to ask….does she miss her lawyer income?   “Well, lawyers aren’t doing that well any more,” she joked.

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