I've been sewing most of my life. As a kid I made my own clothes - matching ballet skirts and scrunchies - whatever I could dream up. My mother and grandmother sewed and quilted, and I grew up surrounded by a deep love for handcraft and vintage textiles.
I took a long detour through physics and electrical engineering, spending twenty years in the defense and tech industries. But sewing found its way back to me when a dear friend gifted us a handmade quilt for our wedding. I fell in love with quilting almost immediately - the precision of it appealed to the optical engineer in me, while the creativity of combining color, texture, and pattern felt like something I'd been missing. From there it was a natural progression back to clothing, and eventually to formal training in pattern making and fashion design.
Arkaby Designs is where all of those threads come together. I'm drawn to the craftsmanship of well-made clothes and the history embedded in vintage textiles - the fabrics, the techniques, the hands that made them. Working with vintage materials is both sustainable and deeply satisfying. Every tablecloth, blanket, or piece of fabric I work with has a story, and making it into something new gives it another chapter. Nothing I make is mass produced. Every piece is one of a kind, made by hand in my studio in San Francisco.
The name? Just my initials — R.K.B. — written out into a word.