About Your Quirky Indie Field Guide

Warning! Not your grandmother’s idea of charming, handmade and No cookie cutter designs or mass produced items featured here.

Enter Le Neko Noir lifestyle blog, a funny & unusual field guide to cute, quirky and unusual designs coming out of the DIY and Indie Craft scene. For the moment, you can find gift guides for the eclectic and discover handmade oddities that will either shock, dazzle or puzzle you. We’re growing so you can expect more in the future. Soon we’ll be crammed with other cool and quirky things like DIY craft tutorials, design showcases and an occasional juicy tidbit about the entrepreneurial people behind the designs and how they promote their home craft business.

What to Expect

Join us as we explore this growing handmade craft movement. Be sure to sign up by email or RSS feed and you’­ll never miss an issue. Here’­s what you can expect.

1. Quirky and unusual handmade products you’ve probably never seen before and never knew existed
2. Curated handmade gift guides for the holidays and by occasion: Great for eclectic or hard to shop for person.
3. Opinions, suggestions and a collection of articles for and about the handmade indie craft movement.
4. Interviews with some of the Indie designers & business owners: (coming soon)
5. Discover how others promote their handmade crafts and business (coming soon)

On your journey, be prepared to be surprised as you discover sweet, artful and functional handmade oddities that are unusual but still retain a cool or cute factor. Made and sold by perfectly normal people like you from their homes around the world. These entrepreneurial ladies, moms, sisters and some gents are students, stay at home moms or co-workers. They are like thieves in the night. After a day’s work, school or after the kids are asleep, they begin production of their lovely artful things like hand knit beards, plush toys shaped like poop dollops, and cloud shaped earrings with smiley faces. These handmade Indie designs might be mall rejects but that doesn’t stop these crafters from selling their handmade designs at craft fairs & festivals around the world, in small boutiques and consignment stores, on e commerce websites, personal business Blogs or aggregated artist’s sites like Etsy. The lucky ones are making a living of it. Others are aspiring to sell just a few designs a month and still others just do it for the sheer gratification of making something.

About Your Guide

Annie André is a self taught Indie Designer, Crafter, owner and creator of Le Neko Noir the Blog and the Brand. She designs and makes cute but quirky handmade gifts, Cheeky eco friendly lunch bags and funny sleep masks. Her functional designs are a blend of cute and quirky and appeal to your inner child.   Her inspiration comes from Dark Fairytales, forest creatures and Wanderlust. The latter is a direct result of her travels through charming France and 3 years of living in the quirky offbeat city of Tokyo Japan. You can visit her online boutique at www.lenekonoir.com

How she got her start

After getting laid off from her job in California in 2007, while pregnant with her third child, she bought her first sewing machine.† Dissatisfied with mass producted cookie cutter style she decided to design, make and sell her own handmade lifestyle products and accessories that were a reflection of her eclectic & quirky style. Having never learned to sew, she started on the daunting task of teaching herself what seemed to her to be an ancient and lost art. Once she mastered the sewing, she taught herself to hand embroider, screen print and other various embellishment techniques. All the while, she was designing her ecommerce shop, planning designs and being a wife and mother. After 2 years in the making, in 2009 she opened her online boutique called Le Neko Noir. For now, she designs and makes everything in the shop herself by hand. She plans to keep production local and someday she hopes to hire a few talented men and women to help her in-house.

Annie lives in Belmont California just 20 minutes south of San Franciso with Her wonderful and handsome husband Blake and their 3 children.

You can visit the shop at www.lenekonoir.com

10 useless things about Annie

1. She was born in Thailand. She is half Thai and half French Canadian and speaks French but no Thai
2. She didn’­t start sewing until she was an adult. Everything she knows about sewing is self taught through books and youtube.
3. Her favorite genre of books is Historical fiction. Phillipa Gregory’s Tudor series, Ken Follet: Pillars of the earth and James Clavel’s Noble House are her favorites. Gone with the Wind ranks pretty high up their too.
4. She lived in Japan for three years. During that time she traveled to places like Paris, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Palau and Singapore for months at a time.
5. Favorite Asian foods are Vietnamese “pho” and Chinese Dim sum. Western favorites are French Bistro and Spanis Taps
6. She and her family try to eat organic and local as much as possible.
7. Her Idols are Audrey Hepburn. She adores William Holden and William Shatner too
8. She’s somewhat of a jack of all trades.
9. She used to be into mod. Now she loves whimsical, romantic and vintage with a splash of menacing
10. Her favorite band is Depeche Mode. Singers are Earth Kit and Edith Piaf. Lounge music from Europe too.