Hyla Frank’s pet project

It all started early last year when Hyla Frank’s best friend was moving from Los Angeles to New York and Frank made a goodbye gift: a pair of pillows, featuring sewn depictions of her friend’s two dogs, which she couldn’t take with her. 

“After that, everything spread by word of mouth,” Frank said. “Our friends in New York would see them. People here would see photos.” 

The artist started getting inquiries from other pet owners and friends of pet owners who wanted to give the pillows as gifts. Today, her custom-embroidered “dog sketch” and “kitty sketch” pillows — typically done in black thread on cream-colored linen — go for $300 to $500 a pop. Lately, the 23-year-old has been turning out between 25 and 30 pillows a month, and she recently quit her day job with an interior designer to keep up with demand. 

Hollywood has discovered Frank’s wares. They appear in Ellen DeGeneres’ new book, “Home.” Socialite Paris Hilton, actress Zoey Deutch and photographer Terry Richardson have her pillows. And Hollywood at Home, a popular design district showroom, carries some of her creations.

It’s not surprising, given her background, that the Los Angeles native would follow an artistic path. Growing up in the Fairfax neighborhood, her father, David, owned an art gallery. (He has since switched to real estate.) Her mother, Robin, worked for a company that made embroidery craft kits. She taught her daughter — who attended elementary school at Temple Israel of Hollywood and spent summers at Camp Hess Kramer in Malibu — how to sew. 

But when Frank entered the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, she started as a photography major. Only later did she switch after falling in love with a particular building on campus, Mount Royal Station, an 1896 train station-turned-school building that houses the textile department on the second floor. 

During her sophomore year at MICA, Frank started playing with the embroidery foot on her Singer sewing machine. It’s a small attachment that delivers a rough, trembling line, similar to a quick, handmade sketch. 

This is the main method she uses to create her pillows, though she starts by making a sketch on paper based on a photograph. Then she projects the sketch onto fabric, hand-embroiders the main outlines in thicker thread, and only then moves on to the sewing machine. It’s a process that suits Frank, she said, because although she likes to draw, she doesn’t consider herself particularly adept at the art form. 

“This kind of medium lets it be a little more messy,” she said. “It’s OK if there are strings and everything because it’s on a sewing machine.” 

Indeed, an errant thread here or there could be seen as part of the visual and tactile appeal of Frank’s designs.

Although she does occasionally use contractors if her workload is especially heavy, Frank generally does everything herself. Her studio is the converted garage behind her parents’ house. (She lives in an apartment nearby.) It’s a modest workspace with a sofa, bed, Singer sewing machine as well as a Juki overlock machine, which creates a different stitch. 

Frank said she can take her work into the backyard whenever she pleases, and often she’ll “half watch” a movie while she works or visits with friends. The time it takes to produce a single pillow might be half a day, and though it requires focus, it has become second nature.

“I can hang out and talk, which is really nice. It’s a lot of muscle memory,” Frank said. “It’s not easy. It’s definitely time-consuming, but I know what I am doing. I have the process in my head. I joke to people that I’m like an old grandma who sits around and embroiders all day.”

Along with dogs and cats, Frank has made portraits of horses and even a pig. She has done some people, too. Recently, she was working on several landscapes for a client who wanted to remember a few favorite views from a recent road trip.

“The fact I get to do custom work, that’s part of what keeps everything creative,” Frank said. “Sometimes it’s nice having commissions. It’s less thinking. I have a really cool image presented to me, and how am I going to translate this into my style?

“It’s funny. A lot of people ask, ‘Are you able to do this?’ My response is always: If it can be drawn in some way, I can do it.” 

It may not be 100 percent realistic, she admits, but realism isn’t her goal. 

“As long as the idea is coming across, it’s what makes it successful,” she said.

Frank has expanded a little from pillows since her first creations — producing a few T-shirt designs — and she would like to do more clothing in the future. But for the moment, she is intent on streamlining the pillow-making process. 

“To be very successful, I think branching out is necessary,” she said. “But right now I like the idea of having my brand revolve around being handmade and custom, keeping it niche for a little bit.”