What do a navy blue blanket with lobsters, a leopard-print blanket with pink bows, a sage green blanket with geese in costumes and a light purple blanket with kittens wearing slices of bread and pizza all have in common? They are available nationwide through retailers like Target, Ross Dress for Less and HomeGoods, but were designed right here in the Valley by Kalyani Kastor.
Kastor, 28, is an illustrator living in Deerfield who designs blankets that appear in big-name retail outlets. Illustration, she said, is an art form that’s accessible to just about anyone.
“I also love how diverse in narrative it can be for conveying stories and larger ideas, and since being a pattern designer, I’ve really loved how illustration can bring joy and beauty to day-to-day items,” she said. It can be serious, but it can also be very fun and joyful, and I like the spectrum.”
Kastor is also exploring a different art form in her personal life: painting. As a member of the latest Capacity-Building Cohort through ValleyCreates, the arts program of the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts, Kastor received $2,500 grant funding that she was able to spend as she wished. She used hers to purchase supplies to create paintings about her experiences as an adoptee.
Adopted from Pune, India, at age 4, Kastor grew up in Amherst, where she had a “beautiful, colorful life” shaped by her family and community. She was “artsy-inclined” from a young age and naturally gravitated toward arts and crafts.
That love of art stuck with Kastor as she grew. As a student at Amherst Regional High School, she took every art class she could, including painting, ceramics and printmaking. Her teacher and mentor Ben Sears, who taught an advanced placement art portfolio class, pushed her to apply to the renowned Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), his own alma mater. His class helped her see art as a real career possibility.
“I was also interested in writing and science, but that class pushed me more toward creativity instead,” she said.
While RISD lived up to its rigorous reputation, Kastor thrived under the pressure. The school, she said, ground “those real-life responsibilities” into her creative practice that can “be hard to pin down in the real world.” She loved the sense of community she found with other illustration students.
She graduated from college at an unfortunate time, though — namely, in 2020. After she graduated, she met with an advisor at RISD, and their meeting, she said, was “very, ‘What do I do now?’”
The advisor looked through her portfolio and noticed that she liked working with color and patterns and that everything was “very textural and almost textile-like,” she recalled. Her advisor suggested she consider a career in surface design, a type of art concerned with designs on surfaces like fabric, home decor, wrapping paper and other products.
“During my time at school, no one really pushed that idea onto me. I was really set on being a children’s book illustrator or editorial illustrator … but I was like, ‘Wow, you’re so right. I love texture and color, and that sounds like a really good route to pursue,’” she said.
She spent a year creating a pattern portfolio and developing both her personal style and a style that would have commercial appeal.
“That was all very self-driven, and I don’t know if I would have had the time to really figure all that out if it [weren’t that] the whole world was shut down for a year, but I really poured myself into learning this new skill,” she said.
After she’d created some designs, Kastor thought, “Oh, this is really fun. I do really enjoy this. I’m gonna try to make it happen.” She applied for — and got — an entry-level pattern blanket designer job at a New York City company then-called Keeco, where she learned the particulars of corporate home goods design.
She worked there for about two and a half years until she was laid off. Fortunately, one of her former bosses moved to Berkshire Home Company — previously called Berkshire Blanket & Home Company, which was then based in Ware and is now based in Worcester — and recommended that Kastor apply for a higher-level position. Now, Kastor has more work and responsibilities than she used to, but she enjoys her work.
“I really [love] every aspect of it, from finding inspiration or trends and making the design to seeing the design printed to seeing them in stores,” she said. “And knowing, ‘Oh, I created that, and that’s gonna be in someone’s home somewhere,’ is such a cool feeling.”
The process of getting one of her blanket designs into stores starts at Kastor’s desk. At home in Deerfield, she lives with her boyfriend and their two cats, Wren and Milo, in an apartment filled with a menagerie of art. Much of the collection was created by Kastor or her friends, including a poster of different beetle species, a colored-pencil drawing of a spider and a deck of bug-themed tarot cards. Kastor loves nature, noting that if she weren’t an artist, she would be “some type of ecologist, or something science-y.”
Different clients commission blankets differently: one sends Kastor’s company a “trend deck” with inspiration images and a color palette, whereas another usually asks her company to suggest ideas based on trend research that Kastor and her design team conduct. The former often asks for 40 to 50 prints in about a month, while the latter often asks for around 30 to 40.
“I’m always asking everyone, ‘Can you give me as much information as possible?’… Sometimes they’ll be like, ‘Oh, we want whimsical Valentine’s prints,’ and I’m like, ‘What does that mean?’” she said with a laugh. “‘Can you give me some more details?’”
After the companies have seen printouts of their choices, the fabrication process begins — but the designs don’t usually show up on shelves until a year later. In fact, both of Kastor’s first commercially available blankets came out this spring.
At the moment, Kastor is already working on prints for next spring, summer and fall.
“All the prints I make are super fun, super silly, with some more everyday options, but I have designers who only work on florals all the time or only do damask and more serious-type prints. But I get to draw cats and dogs and geese instead!” she said with a laugh.
For more information about Kalyani Kastor, visit kalyanikastorart.com.
