Many of have seen and been enchanted by the Sexy Turkey hat while browsing Etsy. We figured Thanksgiving was the perfect time to get the story behind these knit and crochet wonders. We'd like to introduce Angela Catirina and her mom Bonnie aka Bonet.

Introduce yourself!
Hello, my name is Angela Catirina. I am in partnership with my mother Bonnie "Bonet" in one of our businesses, Catirina Bonet Designs. We share a loft in very urban, downtown Los Angeles that also serves as our factory and office. We are both full charge book-keepers and also run www.BonnieTheBookkeeper.com as well as "Catirina Bonet Originals," our wholesale gift line which we also market through Etsy as www.Boodlebub.Etsy.com. We're busy girls — to say the least. In our spare time we both paint, sew, sculpt, and a varitey of other creative things.

We began our business formally when I was just out of high school (1990) as clay sculptors, marketing our work through art galleries and museums and museum stores throughout the United States. Catirina Bonet Designs has had several incarnations over the years as we have worked to develop our place in market. Our current incarnation, as designers of hand knitting and now crochet patterns too began about 2-1/2 years ago with our web site.

How would you characterize the buyers you work with? What kind of person buys a "sexy turkey hat" or a Christmas tree hat?
To be honest, I never thought anyone would buy the Sexy Turkey Hat. It's been one of our two top sellers. In fact, it might be our top seller. I really just designed it becuase I was inspired by that bag of leftover yarn that arrived in the mail. I thought it would be something for people to look at while they bought the "Basic Knit Cap." I knew I would wear it but little did I know that anyone else would. Our buyers astound me the most. They range in age from 20 to about 70 and we've sold the Sexy Turkey Hat to as many 60 somethings as we have 20 somethings. They also live all over the world. Before joining Etsy most of our customers came from Europe and the UK. Etsy has broadened our US customer base considerably although our Etsy orders are also world wide. I'm not surprised to get knitting orders from other parts of the world but I'm always amused when the Thanksgiving items sell in Belgium, Germany, Brazil...The Christmas Tree hat and Garland Boa are the same. Our buyers run the age gamut with that one as well.

Do you wear any of your items out on the town? If so, what's the reaction? (Also, what's up with all the wigs?)
Oh ABSOLUTELY!! I've been chased down the street by total strangers offering me outrageous sums of money for things like: "Angela's Coat of Many Colors." I wore it with the "Oh la la Dress" to dinner and a play one night in Beverly Hills and I almost couldn't get out of the restaurant and into the theatre for the mob that surrounded my outfit. One woman nearly embarrassed her poor husband to tears walking circles around our table. Clearly she was a fan though. It's very flattering.

I tell this story in my listing for the coat about walking through a chic San Francisico department store and the store's fashion buyer following me onto the street wanting to know who designed my outfit. I said, "Caitirna Bonet" and he replied, "oh yes! Catirina Bonet! I have loads of their stuff coming in next season." Ha ha. I had to laugh — but to myself of course.

You seem to have a pretty fun sense of humor. What are you inspired by?
I love color — we both do. We love the unpredictability and creativity of live theatre. We've spent much of the past 20 years or so travelling specifically to scope out art galleries and museums. We read constantly and when we're too busy working to read we rent a variety of things from Netflix - everything from documentaries to feature films. I enjoy the quirkiness of life. I think sometimes we take it all too seriously.

With the Turkey items specifically, I think I was inspired by my childhood phobias. Born into a family of meat eaters, I declared myself vegetarian at the age of 5. Thanksgiving was always traumatic for me. I would beg my mother: "Do I H-A-A-V-E to sit at that table with the dead turkey on it?" Every year I got the same answer - "yes". The one thing I always looked forward to on Thanksgiving was watching the parade.  For years I called it Macy's Day — I didn't know the difference.

Do you make the patterns that you produce yourself? How did they come about?
Bonnie and I both design the patterns in the collection now, although it's fair to say that the bulk of the designs we currently have are mine. I had a bit of a head start. We had taken a break from Catirina Bonet Designs after moving to Los Angeles eight years ago to reassess where we were really headed with the business. At that time we had developed a very large wholesale business of gift items that we were selling in nearly all 50 states. It had outgrown our capabilities and our move to Los Angeles brought about unexpected challenges for continuing.

I had taken a job across town and was commuting on the metro about 2 hours a day. I found reading on the bus sickening so to pass the time I started knitting. Juggling a pattern, yarn, needles, and everything else I had with me was too dramatic. My yarn would go sailing toward the driver at every stop and my pattern pages would fly every direction. I eventually started just knitting without patterns because it was less to juggle. In a year of commuting I had the original 20 or so designs.

I had also never used a computer before 2003. So I spent a couple of years glued to online classes learning to build web sites from scratch, design page layouts for patterns, create pdf files, etc.... We do absolutely every bit of the business ourselves so the past few years have been an incredible learning experience for us.

What's your relationship with your mother? You guys seem pretty tight.
We are very tight. We are best friends. Few people understand it and yet our relationship is so natural to us we can't really explain it. We have always lived and worked together. I think alot of our success in both family and business partnership has to do with the fact that we are both equal and separate partners. We both have our own things in our home and in our business that we are responsible for. Our worlds parallel but they don't collide and I think that helps us maintain such a great harmony.

We're also incredibly competetive with each other. I think this has everything to do with our success in business. We're always checking to see if our designs are outselling each other. It's ridiculous - everything with us is 50/50. We do exhaust outselves with the race though. It's been going on since I was born and it applies to everything we do. We try to outread each other, outsell each other, out design each other. Many years ago we waited tables together for a while. It was the same then. I think we must have exhuasted our customers racing each other to fill empty glasses and clean dirty tables. I remember the restaurant manager standing back and shaking his head watching us work saying, "I've never seen anything like this......never."

We almost never argue at all and when we do it's about the truly absurd and ridiculous - her snoring like a freight train and my phobias about putting cooking oil in food. We've had some comical, knock down drag outs over those two things. It's not that we always agree either — we just respect each others ideas, philosophies, territory, etc... It works!

Anything else?
I would love to say how greatful I have been to the Etsy community. We give a lot of props to the artists and sellers but I would like to really give kudos to the people who shop Etsy. We get the most amazing convos from people who really help guide us in our journey here. I would also love to say how much we appreciate the people that run Etsy and make it such a friendly, workable environment. We're so proud to be a part of such a talented community.